Odd Man Out

"Mr. Louw makes the Rock of Gibraltar look like a bowl of jelly," grumbled one Prime Minister last week at the Commonwealth conference in London. As delegate of the Union of South Africa, External Affairs Minister Eric Louw, 69, was by turns stonily silent or truculently noisy. Armed with pamphlets, books and special studies detailing the sins of the other Commonwealth countries, Louw had a ready answer to questions about his nation's racial policies. What about the untouchables in India? he would ask. Turning on Britain's Prime Minister Harold

Macmillan. he demanded: "What about the Netting Hill troubles here?" India's Jawaharlal Nehru and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, displaying considerable restraint, tried to reason with Louw. So did Malaya's Tengku Abdul Rahman, who had precipitated a crisis by walking out on a meeting with Louw during the first week of the conference. Even Australia's Prime Minister Robert Menzies, originally sympathetic to Louw's problems, gave up in the face of his intransigence. At a meeting of London's South Africa Club. Louw said the other Prime Ministers had greeted him with "ignorance, prejudice and even malice." He told the ministers to their faces that they represented "the uninformed opinion of people who have never been in South Africa." Taking advantage of the tradition that the conference's final communique must be unanimously approved, Louw blocked every draft until he got one so innocuous that his boss, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, still convalescing at home from an assassin's bullets, could agree to accept it. The communique tamely noted that the Commonwealth was a "multiracial association" and called for "good relations between all member states." Despite this victory of sorts, it was clear that the battle was far from over.

Ghana's Nkrumah canceled a proposed exchange of visits between Ghanians and South Africans. Malaya's Tengku Abdul Rahman and several other ministers were only persuaded at the last moment from putting out a dissenting communique of their own. New Zealand's Walter Nash made his feelings clear by publicly stating: "There are no inherently superior people--none." At the moment, few Commonwealth Prime Ministers want to throw South Africa out of the club. The member nations seem ready to wait a year or 18 months until their next meeting in the hope that mounting world pressures will bring changes in South Africa. But if apartheid continues full blast and the Union takes the promised step of becoming a republic, it will almost certainly be blackballed when it seeks permission to remain in the Commonwealth.

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