Fresh Wind

"Save the white man in South Africa." Spotlighting the main election issue with this racist campaign slogan, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's extremist National Party last week swept to a landslide victory in South Africa's most apathetic election since the Nationalists came to power in 1948. So foregone were the election results that only 77% of the 1,800,000 eligible white voters went to the polls, the lowest percentage in memory; in the all-white House of Assembly, 70 of the 156 seats up for election went uncontested. Picking up three new seats from its main opposition, the almost equally racist United Party, the Nationalists ran their top-heavy majority to 105.

Under the circumstances, a relatively impressive showing was made by the youthful Progressive Party, a liberal splinter group of the U.P. The only strong national party favoring abolition of apartheid and direct representation of nonwhites in the Assembly, the Progressive group was formed in 1959 by eleven U.P. members disenchanted with their party's racism. Although in the election they lost ten of their eleven seats to U.P. candidates pledged to rub them out, the Progressives pulled in 69,000 votes (20,000 more than anticipated) from defecting moderates fed up with the lack of racial alternatives between the two major parties. In Johannesburg and Durban, the Progressives polled heavily, winning one seat and losing four others by fewer than 1,000 votes. Set upon by both the Nationalists and the Progressives, the U.P. now has only a handful of safe seats in the Assembly, may well lose its position as the major opposition party to the Progressives in the next election.

The sole Progressive voice in the Assembly belongs to Economist Helen Suzman, 43, the wife of a Johannesburg heart specialist and mother of two grown daughters. A onetime United Party M.P. from suburban Johannesburg's sheerest silk stocking constituency. Politician Suzman broke away from the U.P. in 1959, will be the only member of the Assembly not committed to apartheid. "The difficulties of being alone in Parliament will be enormous," she says. "I won't even be able to move amendments as I shall have no seconder, but I shall do my best." She adds, perhaps too hopefully: "For the first time, the white electorate of South Africa is beginning to realize it must keep step with world opinion and reject racial discrimination as the basis of policy. We are the fresh wind sweeping across South Africa."

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