"To Relieve the People"

"The land is ours again," screamed Nationalist students at Pretoria and Stellenbosch universities. "We're boss now," crowed three young toughs in Prime Minister Daniel Malan's own Piquetberg; they stormed into Grocer Abe Ginsberg's Main Street store and helped themselves to cheese. "In future we'll take what we want without paying." In rural Burghersdorp a pro-Malan voter had got so excited over the election returns on his radio that he ran out firing his rifle in the air, accidentally shot down his antenna. A Smuts supporter kicked his radio to smithereens and had to be given sedatives by the doctor.

In all South Africa the calmest man seemed to be the new Prime Minister himself. Peering, paunchy Daniel Malan took a full week to form his government, while partisans cheered in hysteria and the opposition waited on tenterhooks.

Last week the waiting was over, but some of the hysteria lingered on. Established at last in the official Capetown residence Groote Schuur (Big Barn), bequeathed in his will to South Africa's Prime Ministers by Anglophile Cecil Rhodes, Anglophobe Malan had named a cabinet to match the opposition's worst fears: not a single representative of South Africa's English-speaking groups. Several of the new ministers, like Malan himself, belonged to the fanatically nationalist Ossewa Brandwag (Ox-Wagon Sentinel) and Broederbond organizations, whose members had been banned from state employment during the war by Prime Minister Smuts for pro-Hitler sympathies. Malan's government promptly canceled the ban as well as the Smuts-sponsored program for training Negro labor.

But the ministerial act that set angry South Africans of all shades jampacking Johannesburg's Market Square in protest and touched off the biggest mass meeting ever held in Kimberley was that of Justice Minister Charles ("Blackie") Swart. To symbolize "the deep desire" of the Malan government "to relieve the people of the Union from the strain of the war years," Minister Swart released from prison five wartime traitors and saboteurs. One was 34-year-old ex-Boxer Sydney Roby Leibbrandt, who had been landed from a German U-boat to organize the pro-Nazi underground. South Africans remembered him as the man who, when caught and sentenced to death* in 1943, had acknowledged the sentence by flipping up his arm in the Nazi salute.

Said an opposition member of Parliament: "The Nationalists have taken the first step in the destruction of the democratic system by destroying freedom from fear."

*Later commuted to life imprisonment by Smuts.

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