LAW AND DISORDER
THERE asjust an outside chance, we said last week, that the slide into anarchy in South Africa can be averted. That chance has now be- come slim indeed. When a Nationalist MP can complain because only one man has been shot in a riot (it is not clear whether he deemed the final bag of seventy satisfactory), when Dr. Ver- woerd congratulates the police on the efficiency with which they handled the situation, and when a police officer justifies a massacre by arguing that the natives 'must learn their lesson the hard way,' it becomes difficult to believe that reason has any further influence over events there.
Yet, in face of what has happened, the Times can still call the Opposition here 'irresponsible' for expressing the public's horror over what happened at Vereeniging. On Verwoerd's South Africa the Times is as wilfully blind as, a quarter of a century ago, it was on Hitler's Germany. This is not from want of intelligent information of what is happening there. Earlier this month it printed an admirably balanced series of articles by a Special Correspondent, and has now re- printed them as a pamphlet, Anatomy of Apar- theid. Yet in spite of this correspondent's warn- ings, the Times still feels compelled to push out the tired argument, which has symbolised tragedy so often in the past, that law and order must be maintained.' This, at a time when it is becoming clear even to some Afrikaners that order cannot be maintained, when the laws are so insensate, that they drive people to desperation and violence —so vile, that Africans have every justification for breaking them.
This does not, of course, mean that revolution can or should be accomplished by violence. But what many of our readers, not only in the Union but in all parts of Africa (including Dr. Monica Fisher, who writes in our correspondence columns this week), do not realise is that violence is a reaction to a threatening situation : where it is pursued as a policy (as distinct from sporadic outbursts, which can happen anywhere) it is always due to some fault in the system—whether in Chicago, or Notting Hill, or in Vereeniging.
In South Africa there can be no doubt where the blame lies. South Africans may be in some doubt still whether (to quote the Times corre- spondent's verdict) Dr. Verwoerd 'is a Moses of a chosen people, or merely a charlatan of genius,' but it is easy from this distance to see that the 'success of the confidence trick he has played on them'—persuading them that apartheid is the answer to race problems—is a fraud. Apartheid is not merely ethically repulsive and economic- ally impracticable: it is creating a community which each week falls deeper under the shadow of fear; fear of revolution, of violence, and of sudden death.
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