Business Areas in S. Africa to Be Racially Opened : Municipalities Must Act to Lower Bars to Asians, Coloreds in Most Cities

Most of South Africa’s major business districts, long reserved for white businessmen under the country’s policy of apartheid, or racial separation, will shortly be opened to entrepreneurs of all races, the government announced Friday.

J. Christian Heunis, minister for constitutional development and planning, said in Cape Town that new regulations will soon be adopted to open central business districts, suburban shopping malls and other commercial areas to black, Asian (mostly Indian) and Colored (mixed-race) businessmen.

But actual implementation of the regulations will apparently rest with local city councils, which will have to abolish the whites-only restrictions that have barred other businessmen from most major commercial districts.

Some cities, including Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, have long sought to end the racial restrictions, and the major white business groups have lobbied hard in the past three years for free trade, arguing that market forces and not racial regulations must govern the country’s economy.

Small City Opposition

Resistance is likely, however, in many smaller cities where whites have opposed the government’s current reform program and where control of local commerce means political power.

Objections from these areas, from which the ruling National Party draws important support, apparently delayed the formal promulgation of legislation adopted last year permitting “free trade areas,” but Heunis said Friday that the new law will be put into effect shortly.

“The necessary steps are now being taken and will be executed as soon as possible,” he said, at the same time urging local city councils to begin making their own arrangements to define the newly opened areas and to grant licenses to nonwhite businessmen.

The move was praised Friday by white and black business groups alike as a major step toward ending apartheid in commerce.

Raymond Parsons, president of the South Africa Assn. of Chambers of Commerce, said that “when taken together with other official announcements recently on black development,” the action shows that “progress is now being made in a very vital sphere--eliminating racial barriers to full participation in the private enterprise system.”

So stringent were the restrictions in the past that the African Bank, one of the largest black-owned enterprises in South Africa, was unable for years to get permission to establish its headquarters in downtown Johannesburg. The bank finally opened there last month, after Heunis issued a special permit “subject to withdrawal at the discretion of the minister.”