Blood and Batons

On the steps of St. George's Anglican Cathedral in Cape Town, 100 South African students gathered last week to hold a demonstration against apartheid and specifically against segregated university education. As a student picked up a loudspeaker, a policeman stepped forward and warned him not to speak. The meeting was peaceful but illegal because the students had not obtained permission, under the Riotous Assemblies Act, to hold a demonstration.

Suddenly a scuffle started, and 50 cops with rubber truncheons charged the group, beating students on their heads, backs and legs and hitting out at passers-by and journalists. Even a few plainclothes policemen were beaten. Several students tried to take shelter inside the church, but were dragged back into the street by police.

The police violence shocked students and the public alike and led to a series of angry demonstrations on most of the country's white university campuses. In Johannesburg, students carried placards that read, BLOOD, BATONS, BRUTALITY and WE WILL NOT BE BEATEN. In Cape Town, 400 students held another protest meeting on the cathedral steps and attracted 10,000 spectators. This time police broke up the meeting with tear gas but carefully kept their truncheons in their belts.

First Victim. At still another meeting, police turned their dogs loose on a group of students. To the cops' embarrassment, however, one of the dogs' first victims was a Supreme Court judge, Mr. Justice Marius Diemont, who was bitten on the hand while trying to ask students to disperse.

As criticism mounted, Prime Minister John Vorster told Parliament: "If the police had not acted in this way, I would have been disappointed in them." His Minister of Police, S. Lourens Muller, declared that the demonstrations were "in line with Communist aims of bringing about a change in the South African way of life." The trouble was really caused, he implied, by students from "Northern Ireland, Britain, Rhodesia, Zambia and Mauritius."

In fact, the demonstrators were mostly South African students who have been protesting against inequality in education since 1959, when blacks were barred from white universities. As usual, Mrs. Helen Suzman, the tiny Progressive Party's only Member of Parliament, had an answer for the government. The Prime Minister, she told a meeting in Cape Town, was "by nature a policeman himself--never so happy as when he was, metaphorically speaking, wielding a truncheon." The trouble between students and government could hardly be settled, she added, as long as the ruling National Party continued to insist that the demonstrations were "engineered by Communists and subversives."

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