The Lion's Roar

With voting day only two weeks off, Premier Johannes Strijdom last week carried South Africa's election campaign to his sun-baked home town of Nylstroom in central Transvaal. Awaiting him in Nylstroom's town hall was a capacity crowd of leathery Boer farmers, their bosomy wives, and teen-age Nationalist Youth Bunders waving the flag of the old British-hating Transvaal Republic. From the platform a local politico shouted out an introduction in Afrikaans: "Our candidate is the lion of the North. Tonight you are going to hear him roar."

Stabbing the air with his fingers, shaping if like a symphony conductor, gaunt Johannes Strijdom lived up to his billing. "We Afrikaners," he thundered, "believe that God put us on the southern tip of the African continent to establish, build and maintain white civilization. We must destroy any move toward bastardization. For this reason the government has introduced apartheid [racial segregation] into every possible sphere." At the opposition United Party, which draws its support largely from South Africa's 1,200,000 citizens of British descent, Strijdom leveled a deadly charge: "They are imperialists more concerned with British interests and prestige than South Africa's. Our aim is to make South Africa a free republic."

All signs were that come election day, Strijdom's Nationalists, thanks to effective gerrymandering, would win something like their present majority (94 out of 159 seats) in South Africa's House of Assembly, even if, as last time, they do not get an actual majority of votes. But whoever won, it would make little real difference to the nation's 9,250,000 voteless Africans, who outnumber the whites three to one. For anyone who cherished the illusion that the Nationalists were unique in their commitment to white supremacy. Sir de Villiers Graaf, leader of the United Party, had made it perfectly clear: "The United Party does not stand for equality, never has stood for equality, never will stand for equality."

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