Word: strijdom
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With voting day only two weeks off, Premier Johannes Strijdom last week carried South Africa's election campaign to his sun-baked home town of Nylstroom in central Transvaal. Awaiting him in Nylstroom's town hall was a capacity crowd of leathery Boer farmers, their bosomy wives, and teen-age Nationalist Youth Bunders waving the flag of the old British-hating Transvaal Republic. From the platform a local politico shouted out an introduction in Afrikaans: "Our candidate is the lion of the North. Tonight you are going to hear him roar...
Henri DeBayle, chairman of the Student Council's NSA committee, is satisfied with Harvard's showing, but he doubts that the petition will have any real effect. A similar petition in 1952 helped stop a similar segregation drive, but De-Bayle pointed out that the current prime minister, Dirk Strijdom, has a firmer apartheid policy than his predecessor, and cares less for world opinion...
...Strijdom has publicized his plan to build new schools, "tribal colleges," for blacks and whites. But the estimated Government subsidization for the white colleges more than triples that for the Africans. Moreover, the curricula imposed on the "African" schools prohibits blacks from being admitted to European (Continental) universities. The policy of rigid educational segregation does not merely separate cultures; it serves to keep the African blacks socially, academically, and economically inferior. To insure white supremacy, Strijdom is determined to make it impossible for blacks to improve their status...
...Strijdom's ostensible policy of "separate but equal" holds no water. Educational facilities are not equal; the disparity is obvious. Even if they were, however, Chief Justice Warren's dictum of May 1954, that "separate facilities are inherently unequal," applies even more to South Africa than it does to the American South. While Strijdom's right hand extends the ostensible goal of improved and racial interdependency, his left hand increasingly forces African blacks into a cultural and economic grave...
Although there is little hope that moral pressure will force Strijdom to abandon the forthcoming segregation of the universities of Capetown and Witwatersrand, several international student groups, among them NSA, are attempting to apply such pressure on the South African Government. A petition will circulate in Harvard this week, similar to one that will be introduced into every university in the non-Communist world, condemning the segregation. Though such action may have little effect, it will further remind Strijdom that his policies are in little accord with the Western principles he is trying to preserve in South Africa. The fact...