Death the Leveler

Nature, in whose eyes all men seem equal, last week tore down--at least for a little while--some of South Africa's walls of prejudice.

All day long, the clouds had billowed above Johannesburg; in the late afternoon lightning split a sky that was the color of an overripe plum, and the city's jagged skyline vanished behind a curtain of steel-bright rain. Eighteen miles away, a tornado struck the mile-square shantytown of Albertynsville, where 5,000 Negroes and half-castes lived in mud huts. For an instant, the growling air was filled with flying tin roofs; then the pelting rains crumbled Albertynsville's mud huts into a slough of grey ooze that flowed like lava, choked with sticks of furniture, rusty pots & pans, and here & there a corpse. The toll was: 20 killed, 400 injured, 4,000 homeless.

To the Rescue. Minutes after the storm, Johannesburg's Bronx-born mayor, 45-year-old Hymie Miller, sounded an appeal for help. Ambulances and double-decker city buses raced down the veld roads carrying white doctors and nurses; enough shoes, clothing and blankets poured in to supply twice the number of homeless. When Mayor Miller appealed for emergency blood donors, thousands of Johannesburgers streamed out of movie theaters and cocktail lounges to line up, some all night long, at the blood-bank centers.

Few of those who rushed to Albertynsville had ever before set foot in the Negro shantytowns barnacled on to the gold-rich Rand hills. Stumbling through the debris, oftentimes unaware in the darkness whether the man beside them was white or black, the whites learned, painfully and humbly, how black South Africa lives. Some fetched water from filth-encrusted boreholes that had served the whole of Albertynsville; others, ladling out Red Cross soup, porridge and stew to matchstick-legged Negro children, discovered that never in their lives had these children tasted anything so nourishing. Said one white rescuer afterward: "The place had no drainage, no sanitation, no streets and no lighting. Outside the houses, there were open latrines, pits and great piles of rotting rubbish, swarming with millions of swollen flies. Albertynsville," he added solemnly, "must not be allowed to rise again."

Out of the Pits. Mayor Miller agreed. He called an emergency meeting of his city council at 8 a.m., launched an Albertynsville relief fund that topped $45,000. From Prime Minister Daniel Malan's Nationalist cabinet came an offer of temporary shelter for the homeless in the big, unused army barracks at Lenz, three miles west of Albettynsville. At first, "Chief" Eric Kumalo, 48, the black-bearded Negro racketeer whose goon squads charge Albertynsville's shanty dwellers 5 shillings a month "protection" money, threatened to beat up any Negro family moving to Lenz. But not for long: protected by Mayor Miller's cops, 1,000 homeless Negroes left their camp fires in the open veld and moved to Lenz to sleep, for the first time in their lives, in electric-lit bungalows, with running hot & cold water.

At week's end, cheering crowds met Hymie Miller as he and his white councilmen visited what was left of Albertynsville. "It's a long time since Negroes cheered a white man," said one surprised Johannesburg official.

Twenty leaders of South Africa's blacks and coloreds--among them Dr. James S. Moroka, Christian president of the African National Congress--were tried last week for violating the Nationalist government's strict Suppression of Communism Act. Nobody, including Boer Judge Franz Rumpff, thought that Dr. Moroka was a Communist, but the law holds that "any doctrine or scheme . . . which aims at bringing any political, industrial, social or economic change ... by unlawful acts or omissions" is Communism.

The change Dr. Moroka was accused of advocating--namely, racial equality--"has nothing to do with Communism as it is commonly known," said the judge. "The Legislature, for the purpose of suppressing Communism, has enlarged the meaning of Communism. It is not for me to judge the wisdom of legislation . . ." Rumpff found himself obliged to declare all 20 defendants guilty of what he called "statutory Communism," but he promptly suspended all of the sentences.

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