All Out for Apartheid

There is only one real issue in South African politics: the pace and vigor with which the Union's 3,000,000 whites maintain their dominance over South Africa's 11,000,000 blacks and coloreds. It is eleven years since the Boer Afrikaner National Party rode into power on a platform of apartheid--all-out segregation. Since then, at the cost of twisting the nation's parliamentary and judicial traditions almost beyond recognition, and using a curious mixture of police-state methods and paternalism, the Nationalists have gone a long way toward fulfilling their segregation promises.

In the process they have met with little effective political opposition. Although more liberal in other matters, the largely British-backed United Party generally supports Prime Minister Verwoerd right down the apartheid line. High-minded little groups such as Novelist Alan (Cry, the Beloved Country) Paton's Liberal Party have got nowhere.

Of late, however, moderates in both major parties have worried that the doctrinaire Verwoerd might be going too far in his economically unfeasible plan to herd Africans into eight little "Bantustans" (TIME, June 1) ringing a paternalistic, all-white South Africa. But right-wingers in the opposition United Party, out of power since 1948, decided to out-apartheid the Nationalists in the next elections. They rammed through the party's convention at Bloemfontein fortnight ago a resolution against the Bantustan program--on the ground that it would reduce the size of white South Africa. Outraged, eleven liberal members of Parliament quit the United Party and announced that they would form their own Progressive Party.

With the liberals out, hopes ran high that the United Party would at long last be in a position to form a coalition with disgruntled Nationalist moderates led by Finance Minister Dr. Theophilus Ebenhaezer Doenges, who was thought to be fed up with Verwoerd's rigid extremism. The hopes were short-lived. At week's end Verwoerd and Doenges mounted the platform together to address a political rally in Worcester, Cape province. After both agreed that full apartheid is the only way for South Africa, Doenges said pointedly: "This is my answer to talk about coalition."

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