Caged Men

SOUTH AFRICA Caged Men It was no wonder that the white citizens of Johannesburg were jittery. A man might ignore the 93DEG heat and the potentially explosive bus boycott that Johannesburg Negroes had organized in protest against a fare rise. No one, however, could ignore the tension which emanated from the city drill hall, where 156 South Africans last week faced a court on charges of high treason--a trial which the London Economist likened to Hitler's notorious Reichstag fire trial.

The accused, most of whom had been arrested in one big countrywide swoop early last month (TIME, Dec. 17), included 23 whites, 105 Negroes, 21 Asians and seven mixed-blood "coloreds." They were clergymen, doctors, lawyers, educators and trade unionists, and their real offense was not treason as it is understood in Anglo-Saxon law but bitter opposition to the apartheid racist policies of Premier Johannes Strydom. Under South Africa's Suppression of Communism Act. anyone who aims at "the encouragement of feelings of hostility between European and non-European" can be declared a Communist--and therefore, presumptively, a traitor.

Bullets & Batons. In the first trial hearings late in December, the defendants found themselves penned up in the center of the courtroom in a 6-ft.-high cage of steel scaffolding and wire netting. Only after a sardonic prisoner hung a scribbled "Do Not Feed" sign on the wire and the defense attorneys threatened to walk out in a body was the cage removed.

The cage went, but outside the courtroom Negro crowds in the street, clubbed by the police, answered with a volley of stones. A few nervous policemen drew their guns and fired into the crowd. At least 20 people were wounded that day and the next; court was nervously adjourned for three weeks.

Testing the Breeze. As the court resumed its hearings, police clubs again thwacked on Negro bodies outside the drill hall, but this time the police scrupulously refrained from using their guns. Inside the sweltering courtroom, fatherly-looking Magistrate Frederick Wessel graciously agreed to let the defendants remove their jackets.

Such gestures could not disguise the true nature of what was going on inside the drill hall. The defense was determined to put the Strydom regime itself on trial. "The defense." declared Attorney Victor Berrange. "will seek to show that these prosecutions . . . are for the purpose of testing the political breeze to determine how far the originators [of the trial] can go in their attempts to stifle free speech, criticism of government policies and all that the accused believe is implicit in their definition of the often misused word 'democracy.' ... A battle of ideas has indeed been started in our country."

Unhappily for Attorney Berrange and his clients the battle they were fighting was one in which Premier Strydom's government seemed at the moment to hold all the heavy weapons. How little hesitation the government had about using these weapons was suggested by the court summons issued last week to one of South Africa's most eminent citizens, Novelist Alan (Cry the Beloved Country) Paton. Paton's offense: he had spoken at a Negro rally to raise funds for the treason trial defendants without first obtaining official permission to attend a "non-European" gathering.

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