A Way with Transgressors

Simultaneously in more than a dozen South African cities one morning last week, teams of detectives began knocking on doors. Flourishing search warrants, they brushed past householders to search interiors. At the home of a white teacher of Johannesburg's Central Indian High School, they confiscated an old Chinese figured-silk dressing gown. Muttered one detective: "You never know what these symbols mean. Better have them translated." At St. Peter's Priory, they interrupted Anglican Missionary Trevor Huddleston in the middle of a Scripture lesson and expropriated 44 documents. The prize loot: Father Huddleston's correspondence with South African Author Alan (Cry the Beloved Country) Paton.

Altogether the dragnet stretched over three days, reached into the homes and offices of some 350 South African citizens, as well as headquarters of some 50 organizations. Although the raids were made under the Suppression of Communism Act, their real purpose was betrayed by the identities of the searched. The majority, like Father Huddleston, were simply open and avowed opponents of Prime Minister Strydom's apartheid policy, which seeks to establish absolute white supremacy in a country where whites are outnumbered four to one. Although the police committed many of the stupidities made familiar in other mass raids (seized from private libraries as possible evidence: Negley Parson's The Way of a Transgressor; Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment), they were able to seize the records of some 50 opposition organizations and groups, some of which are proCommunist. For all the police fanfare, no big Communist plot to overthrow the government was revealed. Some of the evidence did show, however, that many nonwhites, deprived of moderate leadership by constant government harassment and restrictive laws, were turning more and more to extremism. At the Indian Congress headquarters in the Transvaal, a huge portrait of Red China's Mao Tse-tung greeted the police.

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