The Silent Critics

Everywhere South Africa's Prime Minister Johannes Strydom looked, there seemed to be women--white women in black sashes, silent and contemptuous, heads bowed in symbolic "mourning for the constitution." Whenever he passed, they lifted their heads and stared.

It began soon after Prime Minister Strydom, who is determined that nothing shall stand in the way of all-Boer rule of South Africa, rammed through his law breaking the Senate's power to obstruct him. Every day all day, four black-sashed women stood gravely outside the government buildings in Pretoria. They were members of the Women's Defense of the Constitution League. In the two months since, the few have grown to 20,000 members in 200 towns. Whenever a Minister arrived at a public ceremony, 40 or 50 women gathered and formed a silent gauntlet. When one Cabinet Minister flew from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth to Durban to Johannesburg, Black Sashers were on hand. 50 strong, at each airport to give him a grim, silent greeting.

"Foolish Virgins." Slowly, under the women's blank stares, government officials resorted to defensive measures. At a ceremonial opening of a police barracks, Minister of Justice C. R. Swart scrambled over a fence to avoid walking through the Black Sashers' gauntlet. Ministers took to concealing their movements, ducking through side doors, arriving at parties or weddings without warning, buying theater tickets under false names, asking meeting organizers not to announce scheduled speeches. Nothing helped. The women were always waiting. The government was goaded into irritable complaint. "Weeping Winnies," one Minister called them, and Prime Minister Strydom himself gibed nervously at "these foolish virgins."

One day last week 25 Black Sashers formed a double line outside the Bloemfontein city hall, where the Nationalist Party was meeting for its annual conference in the Orange Free State. Just before Strydom arrived, 100 husky members of the Nasionale Jeugbond, the Nationalists' youth group, shouldered the women aside, and formed a solid, muscular phalanx inside the Black Sashers' double line. After Strydom had walked through, the Jeugbond huskies turned brusquely, ripped the black sashes off several women, tore up their placards reading "Respect our Constitution." Some shook their fists in the women's faces. "I'll hit you across the face as you've never been hit before," one threatened. Inside the hall, Justice Minister Swart fumed: "This ridiculous action by these people will only make us more determined to put Cape Colored [people of mixed white and Negro blood] on a separate roll . . . The Black Sash group makes us more determined than ever to see to it that these [anti-Boer] people will never again come to power."

Unintimidated, League headquarters in Johannesburg dispatched ten cars and two airplanes full of Black Sashers to reinforce their embattled sisters in Bloemfontein. "From now on, I will carry a good long hatpin with me, and I am not beyond jabbing somebody with it," said one outraged lady.

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