Not Guilty

Four years ago, South Africa's white-supremacist government thought it had figured out just the way to crush black nationalism. Under something called the Suppression of Communism Act, it rounded up 156 prominent opponents of apartheid--mostly black, but including a sprinkling of whites, Indians and coloreds--and charged them all with high treason.

Leading South Africans, such as Author Alan (Cry, the Beloved Country) Paton, raised $600,000 for a defense fund, hired a brilliant battery of lawyers and kept most of the defendants going on a dole of $30.80 a month. As the proceedings dragged on, the prosecution gradually dropped charges against most of the defendants, including Chief Albert Luthuli, president of the now outlawed African National Congress, and Zachariah Matthews, onetime Henry W. Luce Professor of World Christianity at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. Left standing trial were only 28 small-fry defendants, and the only real evidence against them was that they had helped draw up a "freedom charter" calling for universal suffrage, nationalization of mineral wealth, land reform.

To prove that this amounted to Communism and treason, the prosecution called an "expert" from the University of Cape Town. But defense attorneys succeeded in discrediting him by getting him to identify quotations from Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther. John Milton and Thomas Jefferson as the "sort of statements that Communists make." All in all, their testimony piled up to 7,000,000 words, and the defendants logged 20,500 miles commuting on what they dubbed the "treason bus" from their homes in Johannesburg to the courthouse in the smaller city of Pretoria (where the trial was held to avoid demonstrations).

Last week the three-man panel of judges ended the longest and costliest trial in South African history by finding all 28 defendants innocent. In a unanimous decision, the judges declared: "On the evidence presented . . . it is impossible for this court to come to the conclusion that the African National Congress had acquired or adopted a policy to overthrow the state by violence." Furthermore, there was "no evidence of Communistic infiltration" into the congress.

The verdict touched off a jubilant demonstration outside the court and a night of carousing in Johannesburg's black quarters. Many a white man was relieved to discover that, however fanatically the legislature had backed the apartheid doctrine of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd and apartheid's underlying axiom that white men are inherently superior to black men, South Africa's judges retained a dedication to law and the belief that all men are equal under the law.

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