Rightists Challenge South Africa Reform : Campaign to Retain Laws Against Interracial Marriage and Sex

In a challenge to the government of President Pieter W. Botha and his gradual reforms of South Africa’s apartheid policies, two right-wing political parties are mounting a campaign to retain laws that ban interracial marriages and sexual relations.

Although they have no real hope of thwarting the government’s repeal of the laws next month, the Conservative Party and the Reconstituted National (Herstigte Nasionale) Party hope that their campaign will strengthen white opposition to other reforms and thus force the ruling National Party to maintain racial segregation.

With a backlash among conservative whites growing over even the modest reforms Botha has undertaken so far, the two right-wing parties also have hopes of ousting the Nationalists from power, although the next parliamentary election is not scheduled for four years.

The campaign against repeal of the “sex laws,” as they are called, began last week with 3,000 rallying at Pretoria’s City Hall.

To the shouts of the crowd, Conservative Party leader Andries P. Treurnicht denounced the Botha government for “betraying the white man and his own Afrikaner nation,” composed of the descendants of Dutch, French and German settlers.

Without the laws, white men would take up with black women, Treurnicht said, and the racial purity of the Afrikaners would be lost. He added that the mixed-race children that would be born of such unions would be abandoned by their fathers and the legitimate children of white couples would be shamed by “these unspeakable transgressions.”

Treurnicht, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, also told the overflow crowd that repeal of the 1949 law prohibiting interracial marriages and of 1957 legislation that made all sexual relations between whites and nonwhites illegal means the abandonment of apartheid and the Afrikaners’ ideology of “separate development” for the country’s different races.

“From the reaction here and the way it is escalating throughout South Africa, it is clear that this government’s time is short and that it is going to get its walking papers,” Treurnicht said.

In the weeks since the government announced its intention to repeal the laws, the two parties have collected more than 30,000 signatures on a petition asking for their retention, party officials said. They added that an effort will be made to collect a million signatures before Parliament acts.

The campaign to retain prohibitions on interracial sex has brought together the two right-wing parties, both of which broke away from the Nationalists over earlier reforms. Despite their previous rivalry, their leaders now speak of cooperation to force the government to retreat or risk total alienation of the conservative Afrikaners who have supported it for more than three decades.

The rally at Pretoria’s City Hall also drew many who are to the right of both the Conservative and Reconstituted National parties. Leaflets were handed out denouncing Catholics, Jews, bankers and the “international Communist conspiracy headquartered in Washington.”

Treurnicht, a former member of Botha’s Cabinet, called for South Africa to “re-establish a white government for the white people,” a reference to the recent inclusion of Asian and of Colored (mixed race) representatives in a new tricameral Parliament, an issue over which he broke with the president.

Jaap Marais, leader of the Reconstituted National Party, speaking in front of the red, white, blue and green flag of the Afrikaners’ old Transvaal Republic, called upon Afrikaners to “nail this government to the mast of shame as the betrayer of our people.”

Marais argued that any people has the right to enact laws to preserve its own identity. He said that accusations of racism against those wanting to retain those laws are intended to hide the government’s own betrayal of Afrikaner nationalism, the platform on which it came to power in 1948 and on which it has held office ever since.