The Sickness of South Africa

AT THIS WRITING thirty South African men and women are again on trial for their lives because they dared publicly oppose the Nationalist Government’s harsh apartheid program of total segregation of the “Bantu” population (total except for daily work, for which Africans must travel miles into white areas). Sixty-one accused earlier still do not know whether the Government might re-indict them, having had two previous indictments quashed by the courts. Sixty-five others were dismissed over a year ago, after being held, without compensation, for a year and a half (since the first mass arrests in 1956) while thousands of documents were examined.

The releases, the indictments, the regroupings by the Government, have ...