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On God's Side? But it is all to no avail. The charges, pleadings, warnings and denunciations merely bounce off the sturdy Afrikaners, just as the spears and arrows of the Zulu warriors used to bounce off their forefathers' laagers, the ring of covered wagons drawn up tightly in defense. "Every time someone stands up in the United Nations and points an accusing finger at South Africa," says a South African journalist, "a few thousand more whites move over to Verwoerd's side."
As far as the Dutch-descended Afrikaner is concerned, he is again in the laager, barricaded against a hostile world. Behind him are 300 years of white baasskap (bossdom) in a land he knows is his. His Dutch Reformed Church preaches apartheid, tells him that black men are fit only to be "hewers of wood and drawers of water," and assures him that God is on his side. He lives in isolation from the rest of the world, which he does not understand and he is sure does not understand him.
Gold & Ostriches. South Africa is a land of bright sun and haunting beauty. Fine wine grapes grow in the protected valleys in the southwest, while elephant, rhino and springbok range the high savanna of Kruger National Park in the northeast. Ostrich farms dot the harsh, baked landscape beneath the kopjes (flat-topped hills) of the Great Karroo, where two centuries ago Dutch trekboers lived in small nomadic communi ties. South of the Kalahari Desert is the high veld, a great, green, grassy plateau where cattle and sheep graze in endless herds. On the Indian Ocean's shore lie the lovely rolling hills of Natal, whose citizens claim the soil is so rich that "if you throw seeds into your garden when you go to bed, you won't be able to see out of your window in the morning."
It is an industrious land. The General Motors plant at Port Elizabeth last month turned out its 750,000th car. Diamonds pour out of the big holes of De Beers near Kimberley. The busy gold mines of the Witwatersrand (Ridge of White Waters) and the Orange Free State turn out 73% of the world's supply. Not far away, in the middle of the great Vaal River coal fields, the government-owned SASOL plant turns coal into oil, the only major product in which South Africa is not self-sufficient; 18 companies are now exploring for oil in Zululand and the Karroo.
Blue & Orange. South Africa has three capitals, one each in three of the four separate states that joined together in 1910. The administrative capital is Pretoria, a city of wide avenues and blue jacaranda blossoms in the onetime Boer Republic of the Transvaal. The Supreme Court is located in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State. Parliament meets in Cape Town, oldest city in the republic and home of most of its 1,747,000 "Coloreds" (mulattoes), who once enjoyed almost the same rights and privileges as the whites.
The true capital of the nation, however, is Johannesburg, the city that was built on gold. In its towering skyscrapers are the offices of most of the