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Doughty Helen. Verwoerd has never been stronger, in fact. Swallowing his old hatred of British South Africans, he has ventured into such English-speaking bastions as Durban to woo support for his policies, and his theme that all whites must unite behind him or be dispossessed by the Bantu usually gets a standing ovation and cries of "Hear, hear!" In Parliament, the once powerful United Party has been reduced to 39 seats. As an opposition party, Verwoerd once described it as "nothingness—both topless and bottomless." He is not far off. Its leader, Sir De Villiers Graaff, offers vague motions against the methods of apartheid, but is a firm believer in racial segregation. Police have all but destroyed Novelist Paton's once active Liberal Party by arresting or confining its leaders.
The only vocal opposition comes from Helen Suzman, the pert, doughty Johannesburg housewife who is the Progressive Party's only member in Parliament. Apartheid is still attacked in the English-language press, which has somehow managed to maintain a tradition of obstinate opposition to the racist pattern, but the attacks are losing their sting. Their readers, impressed by Verwoerd's successful pacification of the country since the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, no longer want to read about the injustices of his methods.
Black Africa's Image. Basic to Verwoerd's policies is the argument that black Africans cannot govern themselves, much less the whites. It is an argument that most white South Africans are more than ready to believe. Every time there is a crisis in the Congo or bloodshed in Nigeria, the whites nod knowingly and tell each other that "you can't expect anything else from the bloody kaffirs." Kwame Nkrumah's tyrannical rule over Ghana was hailed as proof that Africans were still too uncivilized to run their own affairs, but when he was overthrown, the military coup was cited as another example of political immaturity.
There has indeed been plenty of instability in the black African nations since they were granted independence. The Congo has been in perpetual chaos, the Sudan has been unable to cope with the rebellion of its anti-Moslem south against its Moslem north. Three East African nations have had to put down military uprisings, and the governments of eight countries have fallen before military coups. In addition, only a handful of Africa's new countries have maintained any semblance of the multiparty democracy that they inherited from their departing European colonists.
And yet if black Africa has not proved the model of democracy that its well-wishers had hoped, it has certainly done better than anyone had a right to expect. Since 1957, when the great surge toward independence got under way, there have been fewer coups in Africa than in Latin America.
In most cases, the reasons for African instability lie less with the inability of