The South African Crisis
All that can be said about South Africa at the moment is that something is blowing up that will leave the last state of the Union worse than the first. It may be a General Election; if so a bitter campaign, leaving the losers angry and resentful, can be counted on. It may be increasing resis- tance to the apartheid laws, met by increasingly vigorous repressive measures by the Government; so far well over three thousand arrests have been made, and active resistance has made its first appearance in Natal, where provincial opinion as a whole is anti-Malan. It may be a deadlock between the so-called High Court of Parliament, which, since the Union Party refuses to recognise it, is not merely a purely political but a purely party body, and the Supreme Court of the Union. It may be an open declaration for a republic by the National- ists, who would then fight the election on that single plank. For the moment the dominant issue is the constitutional crisis foreshadowed by the expected collision between the new poli- tical court and the long-standing judicial court. The latest stage in the conflict is marked by the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court of the Cape Province that the Act estab- lishing the High Court of Parliament is invalid. That issue now goes to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the Union, which may be expected to endorse the provincial court's decision. What in that case will remain for Dr. Malan ? Either to give up the struggle and acknowledge the invalidity of the Separate Representation of Voters Act, which was the starting-point of the whole legal tangle, and he certainly will not do that; or to dissolve Parliament in the hope that after a General Election he may command a sufficient majority in the two Houses of Parliament to be able to make constitutional changes constitutionally; or to disregard legality altogether and go his way regardless of the Appellate Court.
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