Step Toward the Center

To South Africa's 17th century settlers, "going into laager" meant forming a circle with their covered wagons to defend themselves against attacks by native tribes. To their present-day descendants, it means turning increasingly to the repressive strictures of apartheid to protect themselves against the nonwhite majority. Five times since 1948, the electorate has gone into laager by returning the white-supremacist, Boer-dominated Nationalist government to power, each time with increased majorities. Last week, for the first time in 22 years, South Africa's voters took a short step back toward the moderate center.

Reduced Pension. In the 31 years since he succeeded the assassinated Hendrik Verwoerd as Premier, Johannes Balthazar Vorster has remained true to the goal of apartheid. Only last week, for instance, his government ruled that a retired soldier named Sam Dorkin had been reclassified as a mixed-blood "Colored" after 75 years of life as a white man; his army pension was reduced from $61 to $29 a month. Nonetheless, Vorster has managed to loosen some of apartheid's tight restrictions. He adopted an "outward-looking" policy of establishing trade and diplomatic links with a few black states in southern Africa, and he agreed to allow New Zealand's rugby team, including some native Maoris, to compete in South Africa.

However gentle such maneuvers may seem, they infuriated the Nationalist Party's extreme right-wingers--especially Dr. Albert Hertzog, 70. Dropped from the Cabinet in 1968 and expelled from the party last September, Hertzog organized his own verkramptes (narrow-minded) group, which became known as the Reconstituted (or "Purified") Nationalist Party.

Worried by the extremists and anxious to prevent them from creating an effective organization, Vorster called for elections a year ahead of schedule and geared his campaign almost exclusively to the verkrampte challenge. Moving perceptibly to the right, he barred U.S. Black Tennis Star Arthur Ashe from playing in South Africa. Two weeks ago, he issued a decree prohibiting blacks from holding a wide range of semiskilled jobs. The order was set aside when businessmen pointed out that no white replacements were available.

The Needed Thaw. As expected, the Nationalists won last week's elections handily, and will have a two-to-one majority in the new Parliament. But they lost nine seats--not to the verkramptes but to the English-oriented United Party, a timid, ideologically sterile organization that favors token African representation. The tiny, anti-apartheid Progressive Party increased its total vote by one-third, and its lone member of Parliament, the spirited and courageous Helen Suzman, nearly tripled her 1966 lead. By contrast, Hertzog's party failed to win a single seat; all four of its M.P.s were defeated. Hertzog himself received only 926 votes out of 9,160 in the constituency he had held since 1948. Observers believe that Hertzog's fanaticism, which included a demand for suppressing the English language in South Africa, and the absence of any reassurance from Vorster, who was preoccupied with the Hertzog threat, stampeded many English-speaking voters into seeking a more moderate alternative.

The election did not change the real issue: how 3,500,000 whites should rule 13 million blacks, 1,850,000 "Coloreds" and 500,000 Asians. But, in the words of the antigovernment Johannesburg Star, the vote may have marked the beginning of "the political thaw [that the country] so desperately needs."

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