"These Things Happen"

In London last week, politicians, bankers and bureaucrats, answering an insistent jangle of telephones, turned pale at what they heard. South African gold shares broke wide open on the stock exchange, tumbled more than $300 million. Winston Churchill augustly gloomed: "A great world statesman has fallen, and with him his country will undergo a period of anxiety and perhaps a temporary eclipse."

Jan Christian Smuts, the wise, venerable, oak-solid Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, was out of office. South Africa, which had been considered safe in the fold of the British Commonwealth (and which last year lent -L-80 million in gold as a prop for Britain's sterling), had suddenly embarked on a perverse, isolationist, acutely race-conscious road that might lead to secession from the Commonwealth and to maltreatment and oppression of the country's 9,000,000 non-Europeans.

Predikant to Politics. In the general elections last week, Jan Smuts's United Party--which stood for Commonwealth solidarity and relative liberalism on the race question--was nosed out by the Re-United'National Party. The Smuts party won 65 seats in the lower house of parliament; the Nationalists, 70.

The 78-year-old Smuts lost his . own seat by 224 votes. He tendered his resignation as Prime Minister to Governor General Gideon Brand van Zyl, who asked the Nationalist leader--myopic, paunchy Dr. Daniel Franc,ois Malan -- to take over. Dr. Malan (pronounced mah-lahn) is a onetime predikant (minister) of the Dutch Reformed Church, was once a Sundayschool pupil of Smuts. Malan left his pulpit to edit a Nationalist paper, has been in politics ever since.

Nobody was more surprised than Malan himself. His flustered wife said that he was "too busy" for comment. Jan Smuts, obviously staggered, said: "These things happen. What is to be will be."

Malan's Nationalists, tainted with anti-Semitism and wartime pro-Naziism, had promised freedom to Britain-haters who had been imprisoned for sabotage during the war. Some Nationalists waged an underhanded campaign. One canvasser approached a white woman who was washing her baby girl, and said: "If Smuts wins, your baby will have to marry a black man."

Nightmarish Scenario. There were thin patches of silver, lining: i) Malan is fiercely antiCommunist, hates Soviet Russia even more than he hates Britain; 2) with a slim working majority in a time of world crisis, he may feel impelled, for a while at least, to go slow. But literate Britons in South Africa queasily remembered a book called When Smuts Goes--a lurid, Wellsian prophecy of South Africa's future--published last winter by Dr. Arthur M. Keppel-Jones, a wispy historian at the University of Witwatersrand. When Smuts Goes predicted a Nationalist accession to power, an oppressive rule by extremists, a bloody suppression of black revolt, wholesale escape of blacks and emigration of British, founding of the "Ox-Wagon Republic," eventual war between the civilized world and South Africa, which would be left to devastation and barbarism.

It was a nightmarish scenario, but there was no escaping the fact that the first installment of Dr. Keppel-Jones's prophecy had come true.

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