Botha Firm on Home, School Segregation

President Pieter W. Botha on Wednesday rejected calls for an end to racial segregation in South Africa’s residential areas and schools, two of the most important sectors of apartheid, and declared that such integration would be suicidal for the country’s white minority.

Although he is committed to broad political, economic and social reforms, Botha said they must be based on continued segregation in housing and education in order to preserve the identity and “birthright” of South Africa’s 4.9 million whites in a country of 25 million blacks.

“If other population groups have rights and a legitimate claim to humanitarian treatment,” Botha told a provincial conference of his National Party in Port Elizabeth, “then I say that the whites . . . are also entitled to justice, and to live as citizens of the country in the manner that they choose.”

Reassuring Whites

In placing such firm limits on reform, Botha sought to reassure whites that they will not be “swamped”--the word heard most often here in summing up white fears of living in a multiracial society--by the changes his government will undertake.

At the same time, however, Botha was ruling out the only move he might make--repeal of the Group Areas Act designating certain areas, virtually 80% of the country, for whites and dividing the rest among blacks, mixed-race Coloreds and Asians--that would demonstrate to the country’s skeptical black majority that apartheid is being dismantled.

Blacks and whites alike judge reform--in its scope, its speed and its ultimate goals--largely by three criteria: sharing political power, social integration and equal economic opportunity. And Botha’s declaration to the National Party’s stalwarts made clear what his limits will be.

“We will follow the road of justice, but not to the point of suicide, and the sooner we tell them that the better,” he said, referring to his domestic and foreign critics.

This brought the president a standing ovation, greater than the one he received Monday evening when he sketched an agenda for reform that included a promise that blacks would be given the right to vote and suggested a complex federal system as a solution to South Africa’s racial problems.

Reform Limits Set

A motion appealing for an end to segregation in housing and education was never brought to a vote during the National Party meeting, although liberals within the party had hoped it would accelerate the reform process. Instead, the party meeting appeared to have more firmly established the limits of Botha’s reforms.

Botha has repeatedly ruled out any political system, such as one-man, one-vote in a unitary state, in which whites would be dominated by the black majority. On Wednesday, he emphasized his opposition to integration that goes beyond the workplace and beyond public facilities, such as cinemas, hotels, restaurants and trains and buses that are slowly being integrated.

“If we think that we in South Africa can apply a policy that will do justice to all the population groups and also satisfy foreign countries, then we are daydreaming,” he declared.

Then, referring to party liberals, domestic opponents and foreign critics who want apartheid abolished, Botha said: “They want only one solution--we must abdicate and create a state, as was done elsewhere in Africa, where the white minority is overwhelmed without structures to protect its birthright.”

Although Botha has said in virtually every speech that the 1950 Group Areas Act, which made strict racial separation the basis of life here, would be retained along with its subsequent modifications, reformers nevertheless had hoped that Botha and the National Party would reverse themselves. They made a dramatic turnabout earlier this year when Parliament repealed similar, longstanding bans on interracial marriage and sexual relations and on multiracial political parties.

Vital to Cultural Life

Botha declared, however, that whatever reforms are adopted, residential areas would remain racially segregated “because on that hinges the entire cultural life of our people and our children’s educational rights.”

“While I support equal educational opportunities for all,” Botha continued, “I say that the white child is also entitled to have his education within his own cultural surroundings.”

The laws that designate certain areas for whites, others for blacks and still others for Coloreds and Asians are not discriminatory, Botha maintained. Although there is little choice for nonwhites about where they might live, he said the laws are “protective,” allowing each race to live together, keep its own language and follow its own customs.

“It is not discrimination to protect black, Colored and Indian communities in their own areas and to give them property rights that they did not have before,” Botha said. “Middle classes among the Colored, Indian and black communities have come into being (through continued segregation) that would not have developed otherwise.”

In calling for an end to segregated residential areas, schools and other facilities, liberal delegates to the party conference had called upon the Nationalists to send “a clear signal” to blacks and to foreign critics of their intention to end apartheid.

Declaration Urged

“The only people that can remove the ugly parts of apartheid are those who put them on the statute book,” said Jan Momberg, a farmer and prominent sportsman from the university town of Stellenbosch, near Cape Town. “Make a firm declaration--we are removing apartheid.”

Momberg, an official of the South African Athletics Union and mentor of Zola Budd, the South African-born runner, said that apartheid has given South Africa not only the image of a racist society but one that is approaching extinction because the system cannot be maintained.

“Everything one sees from abroad is only the worst aspect of the racist Afrikaner,” he said of the Dutch-descended people who hold political power here.

Momberg also recalled that when sports were integrated many whites predicted disaster, adding that there were similar fears earlier this year when interracial marriages were permitted, but that both changes were accepted quietly without serious difficulties. The same would prove true, he predicted, if housing areas, schools and other still-segregated facilities were integrated.

‘Protect What Is Holy’

But Koos Terblanche, who described himself as a “conservative Nationalist,” replied, “Do not try to squeeze ripe that which is not yet ready to ripen.

“I am being told I have to be sorry for everything I have done in the past, and I am not, definitely not,” Terblanche said. “And I call upon the state president to protect what is holy.”