Hot Talk & Cool Choice

Prime Minister Daniel Malan, 79, announced last week that he is stepping down from his No. 1 party job: leader of the Nationalist Party in Cape Province. The news--a portent that the paunchy old Boer may soon retire as Prime Minister--brought to the surface a longtime struggle for the succession. There are two chief candidates: Transvaal Boss Johannes Gerhardus Strydom (who recently changed the spelling of his name to Strijdom because it is "more Boerlike"), and pipe-puffing Theophilus Doenges, Minister of the Interior. Strijdom (pronounced Stray-dom) is a fanatic apostle of racial segregation, who represents the extreme anti-British, anti-Negro and anti-Jewish wing of the party. He put up a hand-picked candidate for the Cape Province job. Doenges, who has the support of the Broederbond (a secret society dominated by Dutch Reformed Church ministers), went after the job in person. Last week, at the Port Elizabeth congress, both men vied for votes.

The vote that mattered most belonged to Daniel Malan, D.D., an elder of the Reformed Church himself. Malan voted for Doenges, the more moderate candidate, largely because his Finance Minister warned: "South Africa needs [foreign] capital, and will not get it if Strijdom becomes Prime Minister . . ." With Malan's backing, Doenges won. To soften the blow to the Boer fanatics in the party, Malan delivered a two-hour lecture full of surefire sniping at the British crown. "The South African Parliament," he thundered, "can abolish the monarchy with one vote. If our appeal court judges declared a [Boer] republic invalid, I hope I would still have enough breath left in my body to break such judges . . . " He added, as if to explain his choice of Doenges, "A republic will not be the work of hotheads. Impatience would wreck it."

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