Blacks to Get Some Landowner Rights, S. Africa Leader Says

President P. W. Botha, citing riots at home and protests abroad, promised today to grant limited land ownership rights and other reforms to the nation’s politically excluded black majority.

Botha gave few details of his proposals, and an important black leader immediately denounced the concessions as “political crumbs.”

In an address opening the new Parliament, Botha said the nation’s 22 million blacks will be allowed for the first time to own property in black townships segregated within all-white areas.

Residents of black townships currently may hold 99-year leases on properties, but they are forbidden outright ownership.

To Be Consulted

Botha also said the nation’s blacks, discriminated against under apartheid, the white-minority government’s policy of institutionalized racism, will be consulted more fully on political and social reforms.

He pledged to review the government’s policy of forced resettlement of blacks living in areas reserved for whites.

In an obvious attempt to calm the fears of ruling whites, Botha warned against “the mistaken belief . . . that the acquisition of rights to land leads to the acquisition of residential and political rights.”

Blacks are forbidden to live in white areas and are denied political rights in South Africa except in tribal homelands.

Botha’s plans were immediately condemned by both black and white elements.

Black leader Gatsha Buthelezi, leader of South Africa’s 6 million Zulus, said, “There is just no way in which we can accept being fobbed off with such lousy political crumbs.”

The ultraright-wing white Conservative Party vowed to “fight this fatal course on every terrain.”

The radical black Azanian Peoples Organization said Botha’s plans were designed to create “a contented middle class which will prove to be committed to racism and capitalism.”

In Washington, Randall Robinson, head of TransAfrica, a black foreign policy lobby sponsoring nationwide anti-apartheid protests by Americans, said Botha’s promises were “cosmetic concessions that have no substance.”

Political Representation

Botha was escorted by police on motorcycles and horses to the first working session of the new Parliament of three segregated chambers of whites, Asians and people of mixed race known as “coloreds.”

The new Parliament provides political representation for the first time to the country’s 2.7 million coloreds and 870,000 Asians, although effective control of national and foreign affairs remains in the hands of the dominant white chamber.

Botha provided few details of his reforms during his speech, saying an “informal, non-statutory forum” would be created for consultation with blacks.

He also said the government would seek to “eliminate negative and discriminatory aspects of influx control,” the legal system that determines where blacks may live and work.

Botha devised South Africa’s new constitutional system, which was approved by a two-thirds majority of the 4.5 million whites in a 1983 referendum and was formally instituted last September.

Fewer than 20% of eligible Asians and coloreds voted in the first election for separate chambers of Parliament. The new arrangement, which specifically excludes the black majority, was opposed last year in riots that left more than 160 blacks dead.