S. Africa Oasis : Port Pulling Down Walls of Apartheid

If only they were left alone, say the people of Port Alfred, blacks and whites alike, they could solve their problems and live harmoniously as one community.

But the difficulty is that Port Alfred, a tourist town of 19,000 on the Indian Ocean coast, is as much caught up in apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial segregation and minority white rule, as any other part of the country.

“The blacks here want a fully integrated municipality--one man, one vote,” Charles de Bruin, president of the Port Alfred Chamber of Commerce, said. “I have no problem with that, none whatsoever, and I think that most whites here could be sold on it in time after they got over their fear of lost privileges and higher taxes.

‘We Can’t Secede’

“However, the rest of the country is not ready for what they would see as a radical solution . . . and we can’t secede from South Africa. Still, we are looking, whites and blacks together, for solutions to Port Alfred’s problems in the hope that the rest of the country will eventually catch up with us.”

Compared with much of South Africa, particularly the other, strife-torn communities in eastern Cape province, Port Alfred does seem to be an island of peace and hope in a country where violence and despair often prevail.

Port Alfred’s black township, which sits on a hill two miles outside the white town, has been largely free of unrest since late June, and youths there wave and shout friendly greetings to visitors rather than throw stones.

A black consumer boycott of white-owned stores ended when white businessmen, led by De Bruin, satisfied a number of black grievances and opened “lines of communication” to the government on others.

$325,000 Jobs Program

A government-financed, $325,000 job-creation program has put more than 800 people to work, relieving black unemployment. And negotiations between the businessmen and black community leaders on issues ranging from economic development and creation of more jobs to better housing and education have gone further than any similar talks elsewhere in South Africa.

“When we look around the country at all the death and destruction, what we have here seems almost a miracle,” a white woman active in community affairs commented. She recalled the mayor’s wife’s annual tea party not long ago when black and Colored (mixed-race) women were invited along with whites.

“I know we have not solved our problems--we could go faster but for the central government--but the start that we have made gives us a great deal of hope for the future,” she said.

Port Alfred’s success so far in opening a dialogue among its 4,000 whites, 14,000 blacks and 1,000 Coloreds is being closely watched by many other communities in South Africa in the hope that it will offer them a way out as well.

Indeed, political observers have begun to suggest that a plan of “local option” might be the best way for the nation as a whole to approach its problems.

A delegation of white businessmen and local officials from the eastern Cape met President Pieter W. Botha last month to press a case for faster reforms.

Another group met J. Christiaan Heunis, the minister for constitutional development, to ask that they be allowed to take over administration of the black townships from the central government while national reforms are worked out.

‘Only Way Out’

“The only way out of the present political morass is for black, brown and white community leaders on regional levels to come together and work out a local option for their particular region,” Hermann Giliomee of Stellenbosch University said last month.

But Port Alfred’s success is relative, its peace still fragile, its prospects uncertain.

Black youths continue to boycott classes, demanding elected student councils and other school reforms. The frequent police patrols of the black township are resented by many residents, and there is talk of again digging the deep trenches that made it a “no-go” area for many months.

And seven black activists, including the head of a team of community leaders negotiating with the white businessmen, have been detained without charge by the security police under the nation’s three-month-old state of emergency. This action seriously threatens those negotiations.

Change in Attitudes

“I think the whites are quite happy because we ended the boycott, and the new jobs have meant a lot to the people here,” the Rev. Kolisile Colebenu, pastor of St. Barnabas Anglican Church, said in the black township. He continued:

“There has been an important change in white attitudes:For the first time, they understand that our struggle is not against whites but against injustice and realize that our problems are their problems, too.

“But those problems are far from solved, and I am afraid that we have stalled and are slipping back now. . . . And how much progress can there be as long as we have this racist system?”

“The system,” as even many whites here have taken to calling apartheid and the agencies that enforce it, is proving a barrier to faster progress on a number of priority issues, according to business leaders.

They say they have found that they can move on economic development and job creation but not on reforming the black school system or incorporating the black township into the Port Alfred municipality because the intricate web of apartheid laws prevents such action on a local level.

Attempts have also been made to undermine the delicate negotiations and to frustrate the growing rapprochement here. Heavy political pressure was put on the white businessmen to break off the talks when they attracted national attention.

After De Bruin received a number of right-wing death threats, he sent his family out of town for a time and began to carry a gun.

Black radicals, members of the Azanian Student Movement, came from nearby Grahamstown to denounce the black participants in the talks as “collaborators” and “sell-outs.” They left after two of them were killed in a clash with youths in the township in June.

Now, the detention of Gugile Nkwinti, 36, chairman of the nine-member black negotiating team, is seen as an attempt by the security police to prevent important compromises.

“We are beginning to understand the frustration of blacks,” a local white merchant said. “We know what we want to do, what must be done, but every time we try, we are confronted by another law or regulation or central government directive that prevents us.

“Take black schools,” he said. “They need a total overhaul, a new curriculum, more and better teachers, more financing. We could do some of this locally, but there are all sorts of restrictions that are hard to get around, particularly when the provincial and central governments oppose you.

“Housing problems begin with the Group Areas Act (requiring different races to live separately in designated areas), and that is beyond our power to change. . . . It makes you want to blow up the whole system.”

David Hanson, a retired industrial psychologist and a member of the town council who with De Bruin has led Port Alfred into the pioneering talks, had warned that, once begun, the process of negotiation could not be halted easily and inevitably would head toward broader political issues. And that development, he noted, would call for courageous decisions on the part of whites here.

The Port Alfred Chamber of Commerce, taking the lead in the white community, is working out development plans for the town. For the first time, the plans include commitments by white businessmen to help underwrite new housing for black residents, an extended employment program, adult education, vocational training and an “open market” based on cottage industries that would get assistance on marketing, finance and management and be freed from most government regulation.

There is much to be done. The Port Alfred “location,” as outlying black townships are called, is one of the poorest in the region. Many of the houses, built by their owners, are little more than shacks constructed out of discarded timber, tin and plastic sheets. There are about 50 water outlets for the 3,000 families and only outhouses for toilets. The roads are mostly rutted paths.

“We will propose the construction of an entirely new, well-planned, modern township,” De Bruin said. “We think the community should participate fully in its construction. This will reduce the costs, it will create jobs, it will give people a stake in the future. . . . This is our top priority, and it will ease many of the grievances that people have.

“The most difficult question, however, remains the black community’s desire for one municipality--really for one Port Alfred,” De Bruin continued. “We believe that a way will be found for a single, integrated (city)council in the future, but we have to build toward it. . . . “

But Port Alfred’s plans are facing a stalemate as long as Nkwinti, the leader of the black negotiating team, is held by the security police, who detained him without charge last month for the third time since June.

Like Port Alfred’s other black leaders, Nkwinti belongs to the United Democratic Front, a nationwide coalition of anti-apartheid groups that, according to the government, operates on behalf of the outlawed African National Congress.

Nkwinti’s wife, Koleka, said flatly:”The police don’t want these talks to succeed, and the businessmen are afraid to stand up to the government. They just want men who say, ‘Yes, boss.’ But the ‘yes, boss’ men can’t bring peace . . . because they have no respect here in the (black)community.”

For blacks, the detention of Nkwinti, a former psychiatric nurse studying law at Rhodes University in nearby Grahamstown, has become an important test of white willingness to negotiate with their chosen leaders--not those the government selects--and thus to reach an eventual political accommodation acceptable to both sides.

For the white businessmen, it has become another problem for which they have to accept the consequences but feel they can do little about.

De Bruin said:”We don’t run the security police. I don’t know why they took Nkwinti, whom I consider a good friend, and I don’t know how long they are going to keep him. At the outset of these talks, we told the black community representatives that there were some things we couldn’t do, and this is one of them.”

De Bruin, partner in a boat shop, nevertheless believes that a new framework for white-black relations is emerging in Port Alfred, that attitudes of both communities are changing and that a momentum is building that will make it possible to work out the town’s problems.

“In three months, my personal views have changed completely,” he says. “What was radical to me three months ago seems very moderate today. . . . We are willing to consider whatever works, things that may have been rejected for political or ideological reasons before. . . .”

Separate Entrances Banned

Some of the 20 grievances presented by the blacks were dealt with quickly: Separate entrances for blacks at white-owned stores were eliminated, a beer hall in the township was closed, a child-care center has been built.

But other complaints are taking more time to resolve and have become the basis for the continuing dialogue between whites and blacks here.

“Some of us thought at first that they (the whites) could just go and tell (President) Pieter W. Botha what they wanted and that would be that,” said L.E. Njibana, leader of an informal black labor union here.

“We now see that they are prisoners of the ‘system’ too--different from us but still prisoners--and they see that the only way that all of us are going to be free is to work together to get rid of that system, to get rid of apartheid,” he continued.

“That is why we are working toward one non-racial municipality. One man, one vote--that’s what we want, and that’s what we hope whites are coming to see is the only way we are going to have real peace.”