RICHARD SUZMAN '64, a South African, attended Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg before transferring to Harvard. This summer he attended the congress of the National Union of South African Students.

Johannes Balthazar Vorster, the South African Minister of Justice, last week attacked the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) as a "cancer" that "has become the mouthpiece of Lefitists" and is "tainted with Communism."

Vorster urged the Union's 18,500 members to resign and thus destroy the organization.

Vorster's virulent smear, given great prominence in the South African press, is probably a prelude to banning NUSAS or its leaders.

In his statement, Vorster said NUSAS subscribes to Pan-Africanist ideals and cooperates with student organizations in Ghana, Ethiopia, and other Black African countries. He also assailed the Union for advocating complete integration--political, social, and biological. NUSAS favors integration of all education from kindergarten through college.

The Justice Minister pointed out that, in common with South Africa's Liberal and Communist parties, NUSAS supports the maxim: "One Man One vote." The student organization has worked closely with the banned African National Congress, Vorster claimed. At the NUSAS convention in July Nobel Prize Winner Albert Luthuli, former ANC leader, was elected honorary president of NUSAS.

After listing several Communists who were once leaders of NUSAS, Vorster added (with unusual sophistication) that not all members of NUSAS are Communists, but that all Communists were once members of NUSAS. He apparently forgot to note that almost every English-speaking student in South Africa is also a member of NUSAS.

Founded in 1924, NUSAS accepts all college students as members "irrespective of race, color, or creed." At present 19 colleges belong to NUSAS, and all students attending these colleges are automatically NUSAS members unless they specifically resign; few have done so. Member colleges include the Universities of Cape Town, Witwatersrand, Rhodes, and Natal, several teachers colleges, and two theological schools.

Afrikaners Separate

But NUSAS does not include the four Afrikaans-speaking universities of Stellenbosch, Pretoria, Orange Free State, and Potchefstroom. These schools broke away in the 1930s to form their own organization--the Afrikaanse Studentbond.

Open only to white Afrikaans Christians, the Studentbond, is not recognized by any international student group. It strongly favors the Verwoerd government and adheres unswervingly to the official dogma of apartheid.

The Studentbond also subscribes to the government's doctrine of Christian National Education. This doctrine, stressing fierce Afrikaaner ethnocentrism and strict Calvinism, has increasingly transformed schools into centers of indoctrination. The doctrine has wryly been called neither Christian nor national nor education.

For some time the Studentbond has attacked NUSAS as "liberalist, integrationist, and treasonable." Although NUSAS has tried to increase contact between Afrikaans and English students, all its approaches have been rudely turned down; the rift between the two organizations is now wider than ever.

The Afrikaans-speaking universities have always excluded non-white students. The English-speaking universities, however, were traditionally open to students of all races on the basis of merit. By the late 1950's almost 1,000 non-whites attended classes at these universities, although the universities did segregate dormitories, dances, and sports.

To the Nationalist Party government the presence of non-whites at the "open" universities was odious. For years the government, which heavily subsidizes all colleges, tried to force complete segregation. It was successfully fought off by alumni, faculty, and students, who asserted that the government sought to violate the autonomy of the universities. But in 1959, despite a march through downtown Johannesburg by 2,500 students and faculty clad in academic robes, the government passed the "Extention of University of Education Act." The law forbade almost all admissions of non-whites to "white" universities. Students coming into the universities now are deprived of the great advantages of being able to discuss South Africa's problems frankly with talented non-whites outside the usual master-servant relationship.