Word: strydom
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...four of the eight Commonwealth Prime Ministers originally invited were on hand. Canada's St. Laurent, for years a quiet voice of moderation at such get-togethers, had just resigned office and been replaced by Tory John Diefenbaker (who turned up on schedule). Racist South Africa's Strydom refused to come for "personal reasons" which many ascribed to an unwillingness to sit down with-or to be photographed with-the new nation of Ghana's Negro P.M., Kwame Nkrumah. New Zealand's Sidney Holland was laid up with a slipped disk. Ceylon's Solomon Bandaranaike...
...against a one-penny rise in the bus fare. In the weeks since then, however, what began as a purely economic demonstration on the part of 15,000 Johannesburg bus riders has burgeoned into a full-scale political battle between South Africa's African National Congress and Premier Strydom's racist government...
...buses rolled passengerless along streets clogged with trudging Negroes, sympathetic white motorists of Johannesburg began more and more to stop and offer lifts. Strydom's police set up roadblocks to harass the drivers, checking and rechecking licenses and registrations, whipping out tape measures to see if the law providing a 15-in. space for each passenger was being observed, citing every letter of the law to delay the car-lift. In the cities themselves, police searched Negro hotels and the servant quarters of white homes to smoke out workers staying overnight without police passes. Railroads refused...
...Unhappily for Attorney Berrange and his clients the battle they were fighting was one in which Premier Strydom's government seemed at the moment to hold all the heavy weapons. How little hesitation the government had about using these weapons was suggested by the court summons issued last week to one of South Africa's most eminent citizens, Novelist Alan (Cry the Beloved Country) Paton. Paton's offense: he had spoken at a Negro rally to raise funds for the treason trial defendants without first obtaining official permission to attend a "non-European" gathering...
...Such gestures could not disguise the true nature of what was going on inside the drill hall. The defense was determined to put the Strydom regime itself on trial. "The defense." declared Attorney Victor Berrange. "will seek to show that these prosecutions . . . are for the purpose of testing the political breeze to determine how far the originators [of the trial] can go in their attempts to stifle free speech, criticism of government policies and all that the accused believe is implicit in their definition of the often misused word 'democracy.' ... A battle of ideas has indeed been started...