Interracial Sex to Be OKd in S. Africa

The white-minority government said today that it will make it legal for whites to marry and have sex with nonwhites, scrapping two key apartheid laws that sought to preserve white racial purity.

Home Affairs Minister F.W. De Klerk told Parliament that the government expects the laws, which he said were “probably the most contentious on the South African statute books,” to be repealed during the current legislative session.

The laws were strictly enforced in most parts of the country but were increasingly ignored in the large cities of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town.

About 200 people a year were prosecuted under the laws. With their repeal, members of South Africa’s white, black, mixed-race and Asian populations could marry or legally have sex with members of any other group.

De Klerk’s announcement was the most dramatic move by the government in recent months toward social change and an easing of forced separation of the races.

Officials of some anti-apartheid groups welcomed De Klerk’s statement, but others said the move was irrelevant to the struggle for equal rights by South Africa’s nonwhite majority. Two conservative white groups expressed their hostility.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb said, “Efforts such as this appear to be a step in the direction of a more just society, although we realize that much more needs to be done.”

“These two laws denied our humanity by suggesting that sex with blacks was demeaning,” said Nthato Motlana, community leader in Soweto, the black city outside Johannesburg. “But these laws are of no particular interest to black South Africans.

“The primary battle is for one man, one vote. We might believe the government is in earnest about reform if it repealed the pass law and the group areas law.”

Pass restrictions attempt to prevent large numbers of blacks from living near white cities. The group areas law requires South Africa’s 22 million blacks, 5 million whites, 2.7 million people of mixed race and 1 million Asians to live in separate communities, with separate schools and hospitals.

De Klerk told lawmakers that the government had accepted a 1 1/2-page report from a committee representing the separate white, colored and Asian chambers of Parliament recommending the repeal of the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, and of Section 16 of the Immorality Act of 1957.

The Immorality Act provided jail terms up to seven years for whites who had sex with members of other ethnic groups, although magistrates in most cases imposed fines or suspended sentences.