Odd Man Out

Having quit the Commonwealth and now undergoing attack in the U.N.. South Africans were beginning to feel odd man out and nervous about it.

South Africa had only one friend in the house (Portugal) as the General Assembly by a vote of 95 to 1 censured the apartheid racial policies of Prime Minister Verwoerd's government and requested member countries to take "such action as is open" to them against South Africa. It was nearly worse. A proposal to launch a worldwide economic and diplomatic boycott against Verwoerd's government was voted by a majority of the Assembly's Special Political Committee, but failed to muster the necessary two-thirds vote in the Assembly itself.

On the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, prices plunged to the lowest level in years, lower even than they were after the Sharpville native massacre. Wary foreign investors are pulling their money out of South Africa. Some English-speaking South African whites are emigrating to more hospitable political climes. "I cannot bear to be here while Africans are not free," explained one emigrant, among 150 embarking for Australia and New Zealand last week, "and I could not bear to be here when they are."*

Even Verwoerd's own National Party supporters are having their doubts. Cape Town's Nationalist newspaper. Die Burger, has recently veered away from Verwoerd's extremism, argues that coloreds should be represented in Parliament by coloreds. The party's paper in Johannesburg, Die Transvaler, warned fortnight ago that South Africa must change its views about racial questions "or prepare for catastrophe."

The mounting pressures seem only to stiffen Verwoerd. "We regard the present position as very serious," he proclaimed. "We must be willing to suffer for our nation." Why, he said wonderingly, "South Africa has done more for the natives than any other country in Africa."

* One South African family, after emigrating to Melbourne, was appalled to learn how expensive Australian white nannies and maids are, packed up and went back to Johannesburg.

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