LANCE SPEARMAN is a nattily dressed detective who sports a straw hat, bowtie and goatee. He likes Scotch on the rocks, buxom women, El Greco cheroots, and fast cars. He uses reverse karate kicks, his fists, and a hand gun to bring down such enemies as Zollo, the Mermolls, and Countess Scarlett. He is the black James Bond and the most popular fictional character in Africa today. In almost every English-speaking town of Africa, young men, most with no more than five years of schooling, sit on the sidewalks and read the weekly picture magazines that chronicle the adventures of Lance Spearman and other heroes like Fearless Fang, who is the black facsimile of Tarzan, or the Stranger, who is the black Lone Ranger. In Kenya, for example, the adventures of Lance Spearman have a greater circulation than any of the daily newspapers. This phenomenon of popular culture suggests a good deal about the tastes of ordinary semi-educated young men in the African towns — their yearning, their uncertain identification with the fringes of Western culture, their need for fancy in a harsh urban world. The magazines are known in the publishing trade as "look-reads." In effect they are photographed comics that resemble comic books, except that the action is photographed instead of drawn. Little balloons of dialogue appear over the heads of the characters...

The white Afrikaner administrator swept his hand out to show the poverty of the Transkei in South Africa: the round mud houses with their thatched cone roofs, the green hilly land that produced only a pittance of corn during the year, the bony cattle that the Xhosa people refused to sell. “We have to succeed,” the administrator said with a weak, nervous laugh. “Our existence depends on it.” But so far, he and the other white officials of the Transkei are failing. The Transkei is the most advanced of the Bantustans, the word coined by the white supremacist government to describe those areas of South Africa it has set aside for black Africans. Under the theory of apartheid, the Transkei and seven other Bantustans, created out of 13 percent of the land, will some distant day become independent black nations and absorb the great bulk of South Africa’s black Africans. Whites, who are now outnumbered four to one, would then outnumber blacks in the rest of South Africa. Once in the majority, the whites say, they would have the moral and democratic right to run their own country — white South Africa. To implement the theory and justify it to the rest of the world, the white South African government is trying, though in a desultory way, to develop the economy of the Bantustans. As the Afrikaner administrator pointed out, the government has no other choice. Without vibrant economies, the Bantustans could not absorb more millions of Africans. The so-called white areas of South Africa would still be left with black majorities, and a powerful and rich minority would still have to hold down the black masses by force. This would expose apartheid as an immoral and impossible solution to the dilemma of South Africa...

Complete apartheid reigns at the winery of fictional Jock Silberstein: white wine is bottled by colored girls in white uniforms while red wine is bottled by white girls in brown uniforms. Jock Silberstein is a creation of Etienne Leroux, an Afrikaner novelist who explores sex, evil and decadence, and sometimes treats Afrikaners and apartheid with mocking irony. By doing so, Leroux and André P. Brink, another Afrikaner novelist who is like him, desert the traditional way of the pastoral, patriotic and puritanical Afrikaans novel. The Afrikaner literary set in South Africa likes to describe the new novels of Leroux and Brink as "the renaissance in Afrikaans prose.” That’s overblowing it, but the novels do have significance, for politics as well as art. Afrikaner nationalists have long looked on their language, which comes from 17th-century Dutch, as more than a means of expression; to them, it is an end in itself. Using Afrikaans glorifies nationalism. Extreme nationalist Afrikaners, convinced that Leroux and Brink use it in a way that soils Afrikaner nationalism, now condemn the two writers as traitors to their culture. After the Boer War, Afrikaners, descendants of the early Dutch settlers, tried to avenge the humiliation and indignities of their defeat by intensifying their belief in the worth of their own culture...

The current clamor over South Africa and the Olympics can be stripped to one issue. Is there any hope left for peacefully drawing South Africa out of its racist isolation? Those who still have hope felt comfortable with the International Olympic Committee's decision last week to let South Africa take part in the Olympic Games in Mexico City this October. In their view, the decision strengthens the hand of those white leaders in South Africa who are trying to change the racial policies of their country, at least a little. But the decision is abhorrent to those who have given up hope. In their view, the decision strengthens the hand of a racist government that, no matter how flexible, intends to maintain forever the basic race laws and policies of South Africa. In South Africa, participation in the Olympics has become a major political issue. Prime minister John B. Vorster has been attacked in scathing terms by members of the right wing of his Nationalist party for making concessions on race to the Olympic Committee...

Natural Homelands Theory Doesn't Apply to South Africans of Mixed Ancestry - The theorists of South African apartheid, with all their rationalizing and moralizing, have failed to rationalize and moralize the place of the coloreds in apartheid society. The coloreds of South Africa are the people of mixed ancestry. One out of every 10 South Africans is classified as colored. Their skin color shades from yellow to tan. Their features sometimes seem Negroid, sometimes Asiatic, sometimes European. Their plight weighs heavily on those whites who feel the conscience of their country. "Even Verwoerd could not fit these people into his logic," says one influential leader of the ruling Nationalist Party, referring to the late Prime Minister Hendrik F. Verwoerd, who liked to indulge in long, logical expositions of apartheid. The theorists of apartheid claim that South Africa will some day be divided into a number of independent homelands, each for a different race or culture. But where is the natural homeland for the almost 2 million coloreds? Their coloredstan? There isn't any...

In the past, novels in Afrikaans, the language of the Dutch-descended whites of South Africa, were mainly pastoral, patriotic and puritanical. Now two Afrikaner novelists are writing books that break the line. The Afrikaner literary set likes to describe the new novels as "the renaissance in Afrikaans prose." That's overblowing it, but the novels do have significance, for politics as well as art. The two novelists are Etienne Leroux and Andre P. Brink, who call themselves the "sestigers," the men of the 60s. They explore sex, evil and decadence, and sometimes treat their Afrikaner characters with irony. For Africa's Old South Africa in the 17th century. It simplified in centuries of use and changed under the influence of English, French, German and Portuguese. By the turn of the 20th century, it was spoken by most of the Dutch-descended Boers in South Africa, but it was considered a kitchen language. The official languages were English and Dutch. No one wrote books in Afrikaans...

Caltex Petroleum Corp. is placing elaborate advertisements in newspapers and magazines here to tell South Africans about its search for South African oil. Caltex is 50% owned by Standard Oil Co. of California, San Francisco, and by Texaco Inc., New York. "Ahead of Caltex," the ads say, "lies lonely years of search and, perhaps disappointment - or the discovery which will free South Africa, for all time, from dependence on outside oil supplies. "Caltex means business - and the business is South African oil." This Caltex campaign is a dramatic illustration of how American business grows more deeply involved in South Africa every year despite all the protests by student groups and liberal organizations in the United States that American investment, bolsters apartheid. Sometimes American firms seem embarrassed by the involvement. Not one, for example, volunteered to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1966 when it had hearings on American policy toward South Africa. But profits are so good that the firms swallow any embarrassment, do more business in South Africa, and, as the Caltex campaign shows, even boast about it to South Africans...

Encouraging Signs of Change - An outsider can fume about the cruelty and immorality of South African apartheid, but there's little he can do to change it. That cold fact about his impotence is hard for an outsider to accept, especially when his emotions are wrought by the sight of an uncaring and unfeeling government trampling on the rights and lives of little people, both black and white, for the glory of an abhorrent race theory. Yet unless one accepts the truth of his weakness, an outsider will look too far and too high and fail to see what few, minor but real ways are left for trying to change South Africa. The power of South Africa must be analyzed with cold logic, not emotion, and the possibilities for change must be analyzed the same way. Three facts about the South African situation must be faced. First, the white South Africans who oppose apartheid and speak in the same liberal idiom as many outsiders have little influence and less power. At the moment, their way offers no hope for the future. South Africans like Alan Paton and Helen Suzman are courageous, honest and exciting people who deserve their worldwide renown and respect...

Nation's Growing Trade Leads to Close Contacts With Area's Black Officials - A white cab driver recently answered a call to the exclusive Langham Hotel in Johannesburg and was amazed to see the doorman lead a black man to his cab. But the driver shrugged and figured the Langham Hotel knew what it was doing. The well-dressed black man must be one of those foreign diplomats he had read about in the papers. The doorman instructed the driver to take the guest to the airport, and the cab quickly headed that way. A policeman stopped the cab a few blocks later. "Isn't this a first class taxi?" he asked, a euphemistic way of demanding why a white taxi had a black man in the back. The driver looked him in the eye. "This gentleman is a VIP from the Langham Hotel," the driver said. The policeman snapped back to attention and saluted. "Carry on," he said. The cab took its passenger on to the airport. This incident was hardly more than a prick in the enormous bastion of white supremacy and racial apartheid in South Africa. But it's worth recording simply because it could never have happened in South Africa a year or two ago... [This is one of a number of articles on South Africa written by Stanley Meisler, Times bureau chief in Nairobi, Kenya, his headquarters covering sub-Sahara Africa.]

The extraordinary growth of the South African economy is undermining the theory of apartheid and, in the long run, perhaps threatening its practice. The economy is doing this by drawing Africans into the big industrial cities and increasing their skills and wages. But, though the theory of apartheid is foundering under the impact of economic growth, there has been no change so far in the practice of apartheid. In fact, life for an African is as cruel as ever, in some cases, crueler. But, if the theory goes, can the practice stay for long? There are conflicting guesses about this. Some liberals believe economic prosperity will bring whites and blacks together in a way that will break down racial barriers. But others, more cynical, believe the white rulers of the country would rather choke the economy than let a barrier fall. In the meantime, the white politicians have promised the white voters both prosperity and apartheid and are busily juggling the economy and the race laws in hopes of keeping both, however contradictory they may be...

Economy of First All-Black Region Is Insignificant - South Africa is trying to justify apartheid by developing the economy of the Transkei, the first self-governing African Bantustan, but so far the economy of the Transkei is a bust. Under the theory of apartheid, eight independent Bantustans or tribal homelands, created out of 13% of South Africa's land, will someday absorb the great bulk of the country's black Africans. Whites, who are now outnumbered four to one, would then outnumber blacks in the rest of South Africa. Once in the majority, the whites believe, they would have the moral and democratic right to run their own country. But development in the Transkei, the pride of the South African government, is so sluggish and insignificant that it's hard to believe it will ever attract masses of African workers from the industrial towns of the white areas. The Transkei seems destined to remain a dull and poor rural area that young men yearn to leave behind...

Small, Group of White Nationalists Begins to Take More Liberal View of Race Policy - New ideas and fresh doubts have infiltrated some of the thinking of a small group of the white Afrikaner people who dominate the government and race policies of South Africa. This has enraged hardline Afrikaner white supremacists who believe the new thinking is subversive. A number of South Africans, particularly liberal critics of the government, see little significance in the new thinking and the controversy over it. In their view, the Afrikaners are enjoying a debate over minor racial issues while maintaining the rigidity and cruelty of apartheid. But other South Africans, particularly Afrikaners who look on themselves as enlightened, see excitement and ferment and new horizons in the new thinking. They believe it could change the racial policies of South Africa significantly and make the country acceptable to the rest of the world...

Windhoek Natives Prefer Hovels in Show of Enmity Toward White Regime - The place where Africans live is a filthy, weed-choked district of tin shacks made from flattened oil drums. The whites who run Windhoek want the Africans to move into a new comfortable, spacious township with neat brick homes that have running water and lavatories. But most Africans refuse to move. Their refusal comes from resentment against white paternalism, opposition to South African apartheid, and the determination to dramatize this resentment and opposition. The conflict could create an international incident that would embroil the United Nations. The U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution more than a year ago that said South-West Africa, a former German colony, would be transferred from the administration of South Africa to that of the United Nations. But the United Nations has been unable to enforce the resolution...

Supremacy Founded on Pioneers, Might of Industries, Skin Color Privileges - To understand the psychology of white supremacy in South Africa, take in the monument outside Pretoria, fly over Johannesburg on a clear day and pick up a penniless, hard-luck white man hitching a ride on a quiet road. The monument, in honor of the Vortrekkers, lies heavily on the highlands overlooking Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa. It is an immense and ugly mausoleum with a cenotaph inside, a slab of South African granite that serves as the symbolic tomb of the leaders of the Vortrekkers. The Vortrekkers - the Afrikaans word for pioneers - were the 10,000 Dutch-speaking settlers who trekked north from the Cape of Africa in the 1830s and 1840s to try to escape British rule and found a land of their own. Their "great trek," as every Afrikaner school boy calls it, opened most of what is now South Africa to white settlement. The Dutch-descended Afrikaners, who rule South Africa, look on the great trek as a stirring and decisive moment in Afrikaner nationalism...

Despite World Body's Resolutions, Vast Region Remains in Hands of South Africa - There was an air of amused wonder here recently when a planeload of Americans tried to test whether the United Nations had control of South-West Africa. It seemed like the theater of the absurd to the white residents of Windhoek. Despite all the resolutions passed by the United Nations, this dry land the size of France is firmly in the hands of South Africa. In fact, it's almost a fifth province of South Africa now. The United Nations is only a distant and wispy shadow. Of course, the six Americans knew this. Led by George M. Houser, executive director of the American Committee on Africa, the Americans wanted to dramatize the impotency of the United Nations in trying to enforce its year-old resolution declaring South-West Africa a direct responsibility of the United Nations. Without visas, the Americans flew toward Windhoek last Wednesday. South African police refused them permission to land, and the plane flew back to Zambia...

Alan Paton is probably the best known South African in the world. His novel, "Cry the Beloved Country," is still the window through which most outsiders see South Africa. But here in his homeland, he has little influence and no power. "When you have no power," he says, "you learn to live without it." He is 64, a red-faced man with wisps of white hair and a high voice tinged with shyness. He lives alone here in the high greenness of the hills overlooking the seaport of Durban. He likes to show visitors the kloof from which the village takes its name. It is a great rift in the hills, cut apart by the ancient waters of a river. The sides of the drop are steep and stony like a fjord. "You have a similar word in America but seldom use it. Clove. It comes from the Dutch. Our word, of course, comes from the Dutch, too." He is president of the Liberal Party which believes in gradually granting all adults the right to vote regardless of race. This would mean black power in South Africa...

In many ways world's first human heart transplant has the same meaning for South Africa that sputnik did for Russia. It is a moment of self-confidence and a chance to break out of self-imposed shells. While dedicating a new battery factory last week, the minister of mines and planning suddenly called on the crowd "to stand for a moment - just a brief moment - to pay tribute to the Cape Town team of doctors whose glittering achievement has reaped world fame for South Africa." The crowd rose and cheered and clapped and thumped. The incident reflected the intense national pride generated in South Africa since the University of Cape Town medical team completed the transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. The pride is even more intense than it might ordinarily be in another country because of the peculiar place of South Africa in the world and the feelings of its Afrikaner majority...

It was a scene of incredible tension. Scrub nurses, wearing flapper dresses of the 1920s, rushed in from a fancy dress party and slipped into their starched white uniforms. Surgeon Christian Barnard sat with only his underpants on and watched the scurrying of technicians and the wheeling of equipment. He burst into laughter, for no reason but release. It was time to begin the world's first operation transplanting the heart of one human being into the body of another. Dr. Barnard and the other surgeons on his team will soon put down the details of their medical experiment and publish it in a special edition of the South Africa Medical Journal. But, while waiting for the full technical details, the general and dramatic story of the operation can still be pieced together from the patient replies of the surgeons to press questions during this past hectic week after the operation...

Dr. Christian Barnard, the surgeon who removed the heart from a dead woman and put it in the body of a sick man, is firm in defending the ethics of the historic operation. "The purpose of this heart transplant," he told a news conference Thursday, "was not to do a heart transplant but to cure a sick man. The only way to do it was by the transplant. So I don't see any ethical question. I just tried to cure a sick man." Barnard, 45, a restless man who likes to joke with the press in both English and Afrikaans about the operation, suddenly turned quiet and measured in his comments when asked about criticism from a few surgeons in the United States. Reports reaching here have quoted Dr. Andre Cournard of Columbia University, a Nobel Prize winner, as saying, "Merely demonstrating that it is technically feasible to transplant a heart from one human to another is not in my opinion ethically a reason to proceed." Others have accused Barnard's University of Cape Town medical team of grandstanding for publicity. Barnard said he removed the heart from the body of 25-year-old Denise Ann Darvall only after she was dead by every legal definition of South African law. He said that meant all activity of the brain, lungs and heart had stopped...

Motivated by Economic Self-Interest, They Are Trying to Organize Black Workers. A half century ago the white labor leaders of South Africa carried banners that cried, "Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a White South Africa." Now the white leaders of South Africa's biggest labor federation say the future of the trade unions depends on breaking racial barriers and organizing black African workers. This change of heart does not come from any mellow liberal thoughts. It comes instead from economic self-interest. In South Africa, the economic facts of life have enough force to change some attitudes about race. Since the economy of South Africa is whipped and whirled by change, rigid feelings about race could conceivably relax somewhat in the years ahead. The path, however will be neither smooth nor sure. The labor leaders, for example, failed in their attempt to lift the restrictions on organizing black workers. The government said no. Though changing, the Dutch-descended Afrikaner leaders of government are still too stolid to accept new ideas that seem too bold. But in this race-locked land, the attempt by the unions may have far more significance than the failure...