Forward with Verwoerd

At Johannesburg's Witwatersrand University, a young South African lecturer in chemistry publicly turned his back on his country. Said David Rosseinsky, 28: "Call it running away if you like, but living in this country with all its political and racial frustrations so affects me that I yearn for release."

As they made plans to emigrate to England last week, Rosseinsky and his pretty wife Angela, a lecturer in the classics, were joining a veritable trek of educators, scientists, doctors--professional men of all varieties--fleeing South Africa. Understandably, the South African government is not hastening to publish relevant statistics, but there is an officially admitted need for 4,000 additional doctors by 1965; balancing off 1960's new crop of physicians against the doctors who emigrated, the year's net gain was a mere 151. Vacated faculty jobs at South African universities go begging (19 at important Natal University alone), and the reasons for the discrepancy between supply and demand are widely understood. Says Jacobus Petrus Duminy, Vice Chancellor of Cape Town University: "It's as though [the educators] are cooped up in a trailer tied to an engine of fate driven by a force with which they are powerless to communicate."

More than ever, the driving force in South Africa is Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd. Confidently he has called new general elections for October, 18 months ahead of schedule. Among the great majority of South African whites who fearfully cling to Verwoerd's white supremacy policies in the face of Africa's "black wave of freedom," the firm expectation is that Verwoerd will win handily. His National Party has an excellent chance of increasing its already absolute majority in the stinkwood-paneled chamber of South Africa's Parliament in Cape Town. The three opposition parties are weak and divided; the timing of the elections is felicitous for Verwoerd.

Despite all its internal troubles. South Africa's gold and foreign exchange reserves have risen by $42.5 million in the past nine weeks. Gold production, the country's most important industry, is booming. The blacks are cowed and quiet, their leaders driven deep underground or into the safety of emigration. All the while, Verwoerd is implementing measures to further strengthen his government and deepen the entrenchment of his apartheid policies. Among his latest steps are:

P: The supplanting of old and mellowing Nationalist politicians with young zealots totally loyal to the Prime Minister.

P: The assignment of the country's internal security to new, tough Minister of Justice Balthazar Johannes Vorster. 45. Vorster was jailed as a pro-Nazi by Prime Minister Jan Smuts during World War II; until 1952 he opposed the Nationalists for being "too moderate."

P: The purchase of hundreds of French medium tanks and supersonic Mirage III jet fighters--strange armament for internal security but scarcely necessary for South Africa's unmenaced borders.

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