CITY IN TERROR

A REPORT FROM JOHANNESBURG.

From South Africa's largest city, TIME Correspondent Alexander Campbell reported:

This spring week in Johannesburg the flowering plums were massed with pink after a hard winter. But I found that in South Africa's Golden City you can't have even a haircut without bumping into crime.

The barber was a big man (280 Ibs.) with strong hands and a voice as soft as the plum blossoms.

"Caught a coon trying to break into my house last night," he said.

"What did you do?"

"I heard the bedroom window go up. I'm big but I move light. This kaffir had his head in the window. I banged it down on his neck." The strong hands gently adjusted the angle of my head.

"He hung there," he went on stolidly. "When a policeman arrived this nig's tongue was hanging out. His face was yellow. The policeman said if we left him another five minutes he'd be dead. I said, 'Ag, man, then you'll charge me with killing a coon.' He said he wouldn't and only the two of us would know."

"So what happened?"

"Oh, we let him out," said the barber. "But we beat him up. A hurt kaffir stays a good kaffir--for a while."

Last week, all Dutch Reformed Churches held special prayers for South Africa's 18,000 policemen, whose main job is to keep kaffirs good kaffirs. No policemen needed the prayers more than the 4,000 who patrol the Gold Reef. Said the Rand Daily Mail: "As he padlocks his front door tonight, every Reef householder will echo the prayers--and then make sure his revolver is handy at his bedside . . ."

Under the Pillows. Johannesburg has always been a rowdy place. It began as a mining camp. But as the city has grown, throwing up tall buildings and sending a tide of suburban homes rolling across the surrounding veld, crime has grown with it. Today, the city's 350,000 whites fear its 500,000 natives; and this fear is reciprocated. Johannesburg is probably the tensest city in the world to live in. Altitude (5,750 feet) and glare (Johannesburg gets more sunshine than the Riviera) increase the tension. The dry air crackles with fear.

White Johannesburgers barricade their homes at night, do not venture out in the evenings except in cars, and keep revolvers and rifles handy. They also keep watchdogs, the fiercer the better: usually Dobermans or great Danes. Every white Johannesburger is ready to dial "30" (for the Flying Squad) at sign of trouble. To whites, between 300 and 400 firearm licenses are granted every month. The most popular weapon with the pistol-underthe-pillow population is a .25 automatic.

No white South African will suffer more than a fine if he shoots "a native," under any circumstances. If the native is a housebreaker, the white won't suffer at all. Last year a white girl, seeking directions in Pretoria, marched up to the front door of a house. It was early evening, half-dusk. The householder saw a shadowy figure through the frosted glass panes of the front door, seized a rifle, and fired. The girl was killed. An early morning milkman suffered the same fate not long after. There was some tutting about too reckless use of firearms, but that was all.

Behind the Barricade. This week and last, Johannesburg crime touched a new high. Incensed by the increase in rapes, murders, assaults and burglaries, whites have demanded longer prison sentences for Negro offenders, more corporal punishment, more death sentences, even public hangings. The South African Institute of Race Relations takes a different view. This week it declared: "Thousands of non-Europeans, because they have been unable to see any prospects of bettering themselves socially or economically, have turned in sheer hopelessness to the . . . lawless alternatives left to them. Threatened by the monster they have created, the European citizens of the larger South African centers have seemingly still no conscience regarding their deed . . . If we do not destroy this monster and remove its cause, it will destroy us."

Johannesburg's half-million blacks are compelled to live in "locations," segregated from the white residential areas. White growth has pushed the locations farther & farther away from the center of the city, so that the blacks have to travel miles each day to & from work. Transport costs eat into their meager wages; most black workers have to rise at 4 a.m. to reach their work at 8, and do not get back home until 8 or 9 in the evening.

But in the last few years, the fearfully overcrowded locations have spilled about a fifth of Johannesburg's total black population over into shantytowns. The majority of the shanty-dwellers are officially described as "hardworking, respectable people who have been readily absorbed into industry but for whom no houses are available." Johannesburg is building at the rate of -L-3,000,000 ($8,400,000) a month, but nearly all of it goes into new office blocks, white flats, white homes.

There is little money for black housing. The blacks have no political vote and no municipal voice. They can neither improve their wages nor persuade the municipal authorities to subsidize their housing adequately. To meet the problem, Johannesburg set aside land at a place called Moroka, where 60,000 natives have built their own homes, unaided. In Moroka, there is one lavatory seat for every 250 persons. In Jabavu, one of the better locations, houses are built in blocks of three. The inside walls do not reach the roof, so separate families have no privacy. Any key opens any door. A black family's total average earnings (all members of it work) are -L-15 a month; the average white worker's wage is -L-50 a month.

Death after Sunset. In the unlighted, unpoliced locations and shantytowns, the native criminals who prey on the whites have their hideouts. They prey on the blacks as well. The respectable, hardworking majority are utterly at the mercy of the gangsters (the most notorious gang calls itself "the Russians"). No one dares go out at night. Black homes, like white homes, are barricaded. At dusk, crime begins. People are murdered in the streets, knifed, "chopped" with axes. Clothing is taken from the victims and the bodies are left for the night-soil removers to find. Though most black gangsters now carry guns, there is little shooting in the locations : the guns are reserved for use against white householders.

Johannesburg's 4,000 policemen do not dare patrol the locations. Instead, they raid them at regular intervals. A police party, strongly armed, will arrive in cars, nearly always late at night. They break into houses at random, demand "passes" (all Negroes must carry passes to prove they are employed by whites), and turn the houses upside down, looking for liquor. The armed police go in constant danger of their lives. A white policeman's wife writes: "It is no joke to lie awake at night and wonder if one's husband will come back safely in the morning." Of all whites, the police are most hated by the blacks. Next come the Pass Office officials, then the state-employed railwaymen. These are the whites with whom the blacks come into most frequent and most painful contact. At railway stations and on trains, blacks are joyfully cuffed about by low-paid whites.

To white South Africans, long confident of their ability to rule over five times their number of blacks, the blacks have suddenly become a major internal foe. This is the real basis of the Nationalist government's policy of apartheid (apartness). A Nationalist frankly told me: "We aim to segregate them completely, living as far away from us as possible."

"But you need these people to keep your industries going."

"Oh, yes. But we want them to live well away from us. Then, if there's trouble, we know where to drop the bombs."

A century ago, the whites formed themselves into a laager when attacked by black warriors. Today, the order is again to draw back into the laager--and shoot to kill.

Black & White Justice. Cases of assaults by white police on black prisoners are numerous. There have also been cases of torture. In one recent case in which the victim died, the policeman responsible was told he had shown "too much zeal." White murderers (except for poisoners) are seldom hanged. A man who shot another in cold blood and then tried to burn the body got four years. But a Negro who stole some cows got eleven years' hard labor. This month, seven white youths who beat an old Negro to death (because a friend of the Negro had hit a friend of theirs) got a year in jail each. Negro murderers (if their victims were white) are nearly always hanged. So are Negroes who rape white women. But two whites who raped a 16-year-old black girl got four years and two years respectively for what the judge called a "particularly loathsome and disgusting case."

South African jails are overcrowded, mostly with Negroes. These convicts are used to build more prisons to hold more Negroes. They are also hired out to farm-- ers. Charged with farmers' ill treatment of such convict laborers, the Department of Prisons admits: "Abuses happen." In addition to ordinary offenses, Negroes may be sent to prison for 1) going on strike, 2) not having a pass, 3) possessing liquor, 4) "desertion." Desertion means taking a job and then leaving it without the white employer's permission. This is an offense under the "Masters and Servants Act." Most offenders are female domestic servants, most charges are laid by white housewives. (Sometimes as a good excuse for not paying the servant her monthly wages, desertion may be forced on the servant by deliberate overwork. If the servant objects, that is "impertinence," which is also a statutory offense --for Negroes.)

Worse than London. All this helps produce crime: South Africa has about 3,000 killings and 2,000 rapes a year. Crimes classified as "serious" have increased threefold in ten years (but have doubled in the past two years). Part of the increase is due to the Malan government having reclassified as "serious" crime such offenses as assaulting the police and "promoting race hostility." Every month 14,000 Negroes are arrested under the pass laws and 15,500 under the liquor laws. On the Gold Reef, there are three murders every two days. Johannesburg, with a total population of 850,000, has twice the number of crimes committed in Greater London with a total population of more than 8,000,000.

South African Author Oliver Walker, commenting on the South African Negroes' many fine qualities, has added that the whites "will make of them a hard, cruel people in the end." This is happening now. deq was a slave to his own rash measures and a prisoner of Iranian extremists.

Economic Chaos. How would the next chapter read? The British put their hopes, so far as they had any, in a shock treatment for the Iranians. London ordered the withdrawal of all British technicians from the A.I.O.C. fields, packed several hundred for home, settled down the rest (about 350) at the Abadan refinery, prepared to bring in paratroops and marines to protect them if necessary.

Anglo-Iranian, which has not produced a drop from its refinery in these weeks, will cut 70,000 Iranians from its payroll, stop the flow of revenue which accounts for 43% of the Iranian national budget. The British hoped such economic blows would compel a change of heart, perhaps through a change of government. But there was an unpleasant prospect in this plan: a Red-led regime and economic chaos might replace Mossadeq. The septuagenarian Premier himself clung desperately to a belief that Allah, or perhaps the U.S., would somehow retrieve the situation.

As Stokes flew off from Teheran, the farewell was symbolically bleak. Save for the Minister of Roads and Communications, only bureaucratic underlings saw him off. The only official gift was a huge pail of caviar. Students standing by yelled, "Borol Boro!" (Go! Go!)

When Harriman emplaned a few days later, the Foreign Minister was at hand to say goodbye. The Premier sent a huge bouquet of pink gladioli for Mrs. Harriman. Among the many gifts: an Isfahan rug (for Truman) and an antique rifle (for Harriman) from the Shah.

Ailing U.S. Ambassador Henry Grady, due back in Washington soon, was still on hand to see if "there's a crack left open that we can start prying on." He did not sound optimistic.

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