South Africa: The Great White Laager

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will be dependent on the South African economy for survival. Eventually he hopes to create a southern African Common Market, composed of the protectorates, Rhodesia, Portuguese Mozambique and Angola, and perhaps even black-ruled Malawi, where Prime Minister H. Kamuzu Banda has little choice but to be nice to the white lands that surround him. Dominating such a market, of course, would be South Africa.

Verwoerd is one of the ablest white leaders that Africa has ever produced. He has a photographic memory, an analytical mind and an endless capacity for work. He is a brilliant diplomat and an inventive politician. He is the inspired defender of the Afrikaner faith, the unquestioned captain of the Afrikaner laager. But his fortress is vulnerable and his enemy within. So taut are the nerves of South Africa's blacks that twice in recent months crashes of African commuter trains have set the passengers off in bloody rioting against their white engineers. Outside his confident country, there are those who fear that the slick suppression he has made a science will one day explode in a wrathful orgy, endangering the peace of lands beyond his own frontiers.

Verwoerd does not think so. "I do not have the nagging doubt of ever wondering whether, perhaps, I am wrong," he proclaims.