Rising Opposition

For two uneasy weeks, white South Africans had tried not to notice the ugly constitutional squabble between Prime Minister Daniel Malan and South Africa's Supreme Court (TIME, March 31 et seq.). While the country celebrated 'the 300th anniversary of the landing at Cape Town of South Africa's first white settlers, government and opposition kept political truce. Last week the truce was over.

In Cape Town's Victorian Parliament building, Malan's noisy Nationalists shouted for legislation to overrule the court, which had declared one of Malan's Jim Crow laws unconstitutional. The opposition vowed to defend the court, if necessary by force. "You are breakers of the law," cried Opposition Leader Jacobus Gideon Strauss. "You will lead the country to revolution and anarchy."

Nationalists jeered. To the opposition's cry, "Go to the country" (i.e., call an election), they replied with insults. "Go back to Palestine," sneered a Nationalist backbencher at United Party Member Dr. Bernard Friedman. "Afrikaners have fed the Jews until they are fat, but the Jews repay us by biting the hand that feeds them."

Nationalist vulgarity coupled with Strauss's new boldness strengthened the opposition. Quavery old John Christie, 69, longtime leader of South Africa's small but powerful Labor Party, left his bed in a nursing home to be present at the debate. He struggled to his feet, shaking a gnarled fist at Malan. "If it's the last thing I do," he rasped, "I'll fight the wicked proposals of this government."

Outside Parliament, too, opposition strength grew. From Major Louis Kane-Berman, national chairman of the opposition Torch Commando, came a stirring telegram: "Fight on your feet or live on your knees." Strauss's reply: "We'll fight like tigers." At Cape Town's City Hall, he told a cheering crowd that his United Party had formed a single "democratic front" with Torch Commando and the Labor Party. Then he issued an ultimatum: "If the government creates anarchy [by ignoring the court], the people will meet force with force."

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