United in Folly

With an assassin's bullets still lodged in the head of its Prime Minister, with its black citizens still smoldering with sullen anger, with a shocked world still crying its condemnation, South Africa incredibly seemed to have learned nothing from its fortnight of revolt. Far from recognizing that something was drastically wrong, the ruling Nationalists, who are mostly Afrikaners, closed ranks. The official opposition, the United Party, which speaks for most of the English-speaking population, offered some minor quibbles but made clear that it stood shoulder to shoulder with the Nationalists in their efforts to put down the rioters and preserve white privilege. In fact, the crisis dramatized the extraordinary fact that in South Africa, apartheid has the sympathy and support of almost every white man.

Home for Idlers. The government's own answer to the explosion apartheid had generated was more apartheid. Hendrik Verwoerd's basic racist policies would continue, said Minister of Lands Paul Sauer, 62, sitting in as head of the Cabinet for the hospitalized Prime Minister. Minister of Justice Franc,ois Erasmus proposed to rid the cities of "idlers and other superfluous Bantu" by sending them back to the Bantu areas in the back country. White employers had already made "idlers" of thousands by firing Africans who had stayed away from work, and Erasmus' police set to work rounding them up. There was hopeful talk of a massive speedup in Verwoerd's program to create a group of rural statelets called Bantustans for use as a faraway residence for most of the black population. The government also launched a crash program to encourage more white immigration from Europe.

Voice of Conscience. A few protests came from the tiny group of Progressive Party members of Parliament, but the loudest voice of opposition came from churchmen. From Swaziland, where he had fled to avoid arrest by Verwoerd's police, Ambrose Reeves, Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg, published an Easter message: "As Christians, we dare not pretend that we have no responsibility for all that is happening in South Africa ... To do that would make us absentees from history." Militant Joost de Blank, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, aimed his attack at the Dutch Reformed Church, which provides the philosophic base for apartheid. "This hideous doctrine of apartheid must be openly condemned," said De Blank. "The Africans must be shown by constructive action--not words alone --that the churches have turned their backs on compulsory apartheid." He demanded that the Dutch Reformed Church repudiate apartheid or be thrown out of world religious bodies.

Dutch Reformed leaders, unmoved, accused De Blank of pointing "an unclean finger of accusation." It is proper, they said, for the whites to tell the African that they did not wish to accept him in their church, for it would not be fair to expect him to be an imitation of the whites. "Instead the Bantu should serve God in his own church," insisted one Dutch Reformed spokesman.

But if someone could shake the long-held rationale of the Dutch Reformed hierarchy, South Africa's stubborn men might at long last be shaken in their self-righteous faith in apartheid itself.

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