Love in S. Africa : ‘Heartbreak Law’ Repeal Not the End

Theirs was a courtship of stolen kisses, secret messages, clandestine dates in faraway suburbs and, finally, elopement to a community where they were not known.

“Had we been caught, I would have gone to jail for sure--that is, if I wasn’t beaten to death first,” Charles Lottering said recently. “What we were doing was, in the eyes of the law, one of the worst possible crimes, something like treason.”

Lottering, 28, is a Colored, or a person of mixed race, and Magarida Paula Jardim, 27, now his wife of six years, is white. South African law has prohibited marriages between whites and nonwhites since 1949, and all interracial sexual relations since 1957.

“Love made us outlaws,” Lottering said. “In the view of whites, I was a thief--I had stolen one of their women--and Paula was a whore and a traitor to her people, . . . and our children, in the eyes of the law, are illegitimate. Our love, somehow, was a threat to the nation.”

‘Clandestine Couples’

The Lotterings’ marriage--they were wed in an Islamic ceremony with religious but not legal standing--is one of several thousand that have taken place “across the color line” over the past 36 years despite the ban.

Sometimes these “clandestine couples” have been married in religious ceremonies here, sometimes abroad. But most of them chose simply to live together in relationships that have had to withstand strong family disapproval, social ostracism and unremitting state efforts to break them up.

Now, these marriages will get formal government recognition with the repeal this month of South Africa’s anti-miscegenation legislation--the “heartbreak laws.” These laws have long been part of the foundation of apartheid, the country’s white supremacist system of strict racial separation.

Free at Last

“I finally will be free,” Paula said in an interview at the couple’s home here in a Colored township outside Pretoria, the South African capital. “I will be able to walk with my husband in town, to take his arm, put my head on his shoulder even, without being afraid of being arrested for consorting with a black man. Ten years is really too long to keep love secret.”

The laws’ repeal will leave many of the problems faced by interracial couples still to be resolved--for example, where they may live in their segregated society--but it will bring relief from midnight police raids on their homes, and it will finally recognize, as a government minister told Parliament, that “love knows no limits.”

“South Africa seems to be growing up at last and acknowledging that people, whether they are black or white, African or European, are, first of all, human beings and must be treated with common respect and dignity,” Hubert Reitbauer, 39, an Austrian-born mine equipment technician, said. He commented after “immorality” charges were dropped against him and Lettie Baloyi, a black woman with whom he has lived for six years.

“This country still has a very, very long way to go, and it will never make up the terrible hurt it has caused so many people, but this is a start,” he said.

For Bill and Shereen, a Cape Town couple who asked that their last names not be used, repeal of the sex laws “ends a nightmare that drove us both to the point of nervous breakdowns,” as she put it. “We love each other deeply and have lived together for almost 10 years, but the police harassment and the opposition of our families have really made life hell.

“We have moved 17 times, almost every six months,” Shereen said. “Police have broken our door down to catch us in bed, and they have photographed us through the window as we made love.

“They have stripped the sheets off our bed and taken me to the (police) surgeon for a very intimate pelvic examination to get evidence for their immorality charges. We have been arrested nine times, and each of us has gone to jail twice.”

More than 20,000 people have been prosecuted over the years under the 1957 immorality act banning interracial sex, and at least half were convicted. Last year, 160 cases were brought to court, and charges against 27 persons, including Reitbauer and Baloyi, were pending when the government announced its intention to repeal the laws.

Six persons convicted under the act are still in jail but will probably be freed shortly under a government amnesty.

‘We Get Insults’

But interracial couples have had to face more than just police harassment to stay together.

“Even today, in a much more liberal climate than 10 years ago, we get insults in the crudest terms from blacks as well as whites when we go out together,” Shereen, 36, said. “If Bill takes Nadia (their 5-year-old daughter) out for a walk, people stop and stare and point because she is noticeably darker than he is with his red hair and freckles. Kids call her a bastard and things that are even worse.”

Shereen, who under South Africa’s racial classification system is a “Colored--Cape Malay,” a descendant of slaves brought from the Malay Peninsula three centuries ago, saw a number of her friends marry whites, often foreigners like Bill, an Australian, and leave South Africa because of the tremendous pressures.

They, too, considered emigrating, she confessed, but did not because “we both love this country--isn’t that ironic?”

“Every day seems to bring new torments, and we have often asked ourselves whether this is all worth it,” she said. “True, we have our love, but why should something so precious bring so much pain?”

Sylvia Vollenhoven, 33, a Colored newswoman in Cape Town, recalled the hostility she and her husband, Bob Sedon, 32, an Englishman, encountered when they were married in Britain five years ago.

Family Feared Trouble

“Most people expect champagne and congratulations when they announce their marriage plans,” she said. “With few exceptions, we got discouragement and dire warnings. My family fell apart with fear and concern for our safety. It was not always officialdom we had to fight. Social attitudes are sometimes worse.”

Lettie Baloyi, 30, a former model, said: “Most whites think blacks have loose morals, and when they see a black woman with a white man they assume she is a prostitute. They look you up and down, and you know they are thinking the dirtiest of thoughts.”

Vollenhoven, who is politically active, had additional problems. “In radical black terms, it is a sellout to marry a white because it makes the society look normal,” she said, recalling how many of her friends thought she was trying to “escape” from apartheid by marrying a white. “It was a crisis of conscience between what I hold as a political ideology and my personal life. They were invariably opposed.”

Father Basil van Rensburg, pastor of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Cape Town, who has married seven interracial couples over the last eight years, observed: “The prejudice against interracial marriage goes very, very deep in our society, and among Afrikaners (descendants of the Dutch, French and German colonists here), it is almost primordial because they see it as a threat to their survival as a nation.”

‘Very Severe Test’

“Couples who take on this burden (of an interracial marriage) are putting themselves to a very severe test, but those who survive it have as strong a commitment to each other as one could hope for in a marriage. There are, of course, a lot of white men in this town just shacked up with Colored girls because they are so beautiful, and for many of them there is the lure of the ‘forbidden fruit’ as well.”

Van Rensburg and other observers feel that the repeal of the anti-miscegenation laws will not bring a rush of interracial dating and marriages because of the still strong social disapproval of them as well as unresolved problems caused by the continued segregation of housing, schools and most public facilities.

“We can sleep together, but we cannot live together under this reform,” Reitbauer commented, noting that the government has declared its intention to retain the Group Areas Act, which sets aside different residential areas for each race. “As soon as we get married, we will be in trouble again. As my wife, she would still have to live in a black township, and I would have to live in a white area.”

Registered as ‘Maid’

Reitbauer’s novel solution has been to register Baloyi as his maid and get her a permit to live and work in a white area as a domestic servant.

That may keep everything legal at his home 30 miles southwest of Johannesburg, but some of his white neighbors remain unhappy about having an interracial couple with a 3-year-old son in the area. Just last week, two men in a truck set fire to the dry grass in front of his home.

“At night, when my son and I are alone sometimes, it can be quite frightening,” Baloyi said. Reitbauer keeps a pistol handy when strangers pull onto the property.

Government officials have suggested that some neighborhoods that already house interracial couples will be formally designated interracial “gray areas.” Van Rensburg and other Cape Town clergymen hope that a formerly Colored area in the city that was cleared in an urban renewal project will be declared a racially open area.

“This would be the first step toward getting rid of the Group Areas Act,” Van Rensburg said, “and that is the next logical step after the repeal of these sex laws. After all, the government will have formally recognized and accepted a group of people that don’t fit anywhere.”

Interracial ‘Gray Areas’

But government officials, hoping to calm the outrage of conservative whites over the repeal of the laws, have said that no other provisions, aside from the designation of some “gray areas,” will be made for the interracial couples so that they may travel together on segregated trains or make use of other segregated facilities, such as restaurants and hotels.

“The repeal of these two laws is not such a wonderful thing as the government would like everyone to believe,” Lottering said. “Still, it is something for the Afrikaners to admit that they have been wrong all these years. . . . . It gives us a bit of hope that in time, apartheid will go completely, not soon but someday.”

The Lotterings, who began dating each other in 1975 as teen-agers, largely escaped police harassment, but their life together has been far from easy.

When Paula’s family, Portuguese from the Madeira Islands who settled in South Africa 30 years ago, discovered through an anonymous telephone call in 1979 that she was pregnant, they hid here in Eersterust, not daring to go out during the day. Then they fled to Rustenburg, a town 50 miles west of Pretoria where they could live in nearby Bophuthatswana, one of South Africa’s nominally independent black homelands, where other interracial couples have taken refuge.

Chased by Brothers

“My heels were really hot when we left,” Lottering recalled. “Her family was out looking for me every night. The day we left for Rustenburg, her brothers were only minutes behind. . . . I lived in such fear all the time. I could not eat properly because of all the tension. I was a nervous wreck. It was not just that I could go to jail for loving a white woman, but that her family might kill me, with help from whoever was passing by.”

They had met four years earlier when Paula began working at a jewelry shop in Pretoria, across from the furniture store where Charles worked.

“We started flirting from across the street,” Charles recalled. “It was a bit naughty at first. After all, this is South Africa, and a black man like me is not supposed to look at a white woman. Sometimes I would send her flowers anonymously. Other times I would get a black girl in our store to carry a message. Then, on Christmas Eve, 1975, I blew her a couple of kisses--and she blew a couple back. And then I thought ‘Oh, my God, what have I started?’ ”

Paula’s first reaction was that of a prim, 17-year-old girl, brought up in a strict Portuguese family and educated in a Catholic convent.

“ ‘What does this bloody black man want with me?’ I thought, but then his charm began to win me over,” she said. “We started going out, but very secretly. I didn’t dare tell my mother, and I had to lie all the time. To go out with a black man was just unimaginable, truly a fall from grace.”

Wanted Church Wedding

To avoid attention, they did most of their courting in Colored and Indian townships around Pretoria and in more cosmopolitan areas of Johannesburg where interracial couples are quietly tolerated. Sometimes they would go into the warehouse of the furniture store where Lottering worked, and sometimes a meeting could be arranged with the connivance of his white boss.

When Lottering’s divorce from a brief first marriage to a Colored woman became final, he and Paula planned to flee to Swaziland, an independent kingdom wedged between South Africa and Mozambique, where many interracial couples had already moved. But her pregnancy and her family’s discovery of their secret romance forced them to go to Rustenburg, where Lottering got a transfer to another branch of the same furniture store chain.

“First, we were married under Islamic law by a Muslim sheik,” Lottering recalled. “It is one thing to live outside the law, as outlaws in the eyes of the state, but it is another to live in sin. . . . As Catholics, we wanted a church wedding--and we still do--but this is the best we could do because of the laws at the time.”

After their first child, Lizanne, now 5, was born and Paula became pregnant with her second, Warren Paul, now 4, she and her mother became reconciled, and the Lotterings agreed to move back to the Pretoria area. “If I am not going to be terrorized, I said, then we will come back,” Lottering recalled. “A mother and a daughter need each other, I know, but we don’t want to live in fear.”

Family Deeply Hurt

Paula says her father still does not speak to her, though he has relented to the extent of playing with his grandchildren. “There is a sense of deep hurt on both sides,” she said, “and it will take time to heal.”

She still gets threatening telephone calls and letters, she said, and has lost several jobs when her employers learned that she was married to a nonwhite. But in Eersterust, where more than 40 interracial couples live, she feels that she has been made welcome by the Colored community. “Here is where our home is,” she said, “and I don’t ever want to leave.”

But Lottering had “many, many fights” with his family over his white bride. “They saw her as something of a curse on our family, bringing everyone trouble,” he said. “ ‘Why her?’ they kept asking. ‘Don’t you realize this is South Africa, that you’ll never be able to have a normal life?’

“The problems were not only from her family, I must admit. When I was in need of my family, nobody wanted to help or even understand, except my grandparents, who warned me what a hard life we were choosing.”

They Have No Regrets

To deal with some of their problems, the Lotterings had begun the complex legal proceedings to have Paula reclassified as Colored, a process that as many as 300 interracial couples have gone through annually to allow them to marry across the color line. “If you understand what it means to be white in South Africa and what it means if you are not,” she said, “then you can see how desperate we were at times--and the strength of my commitment to Charles and to our marriage.”

Like other interracial couples whose love has withstood all these tests, the Lotterings say they have no regrets.

“We always looked forward,” Paula said. “That is the only way we got through all this. And meek little me, I became a fighter--I fought all the way, even when the temptation was great to give up. I fought for my husband, I fought for my children, I fought for my home, and it was all worth it.”