S. Africa May Let Some Blacks Purchase Land

The government said Wednesday that it will propose next year that blacks be allowed to own land for the first time in 72 years, but the laws will not lift restrictions on where they can live.

The proposal would apply only to the approximately one-sixth of the nation’s 25 million blacks who already have the right to buy transferable 99-year leases on property.

A prominent white critic of the government’s racial policies said the announcement was “important to black people in an emotional way” but was “not a dismantling of apartheid.”

The announcement was made by Chris Heunis, minister of constitutional development and planning, in a speech to black Soweto township councilmen after a tour of Soweto near Johannesburg.

Heunis said the Cabinet decided Tuesday to implement President Pieter W. Botha’s statement of intention in Parliament early this year to extend land ownership rights to blacks as part of a gradual reform program.

“I am proud to announce today that the government decided yesterday to grant freehold rights to all black people who qualify in terms of the 99-year leasehold to own property,” Heunis said.

Urban Blacks Affected

The decision would affect urban blacks, who already have rights to live near white cities, he said, but does not imply a change in requirements that whites, blacks, Asians and people of mixed race live in separate neighborhoods.

Sheena Duncan, president of the Black Sash, a multiracial women’s organization that opposes apartheid, said about 4 million blacks would be affected.

For more than five years, urban blacks have been permitted to buy 99-year leases on property, but comparatively few have done so. Duncan said the leases are expensive and, in addition, “they (blacks) don’t trust the government.”

The government said in June that about 30,000 blacks applied for leases in 1984.

“Freehold is important to black people in an emotional way, but in practical terms it does not mean anything,” Duncan said. “Ninety-nine-year leases are in effect perpetual, since they can be transferred and the 99-year period is renewed with each transfer.”

Apartheid Seen Intact

“This is the kind of change that is important to whites because some part of apartheid has been abolished, but the majority of blacks still cannot buy land where they choose to live. It is not a dismantling of apartheid.”

Blacks could own land outright until the Land Act of 1913. Hundreds of thousands continued to live in villages they owned, but most have been moved to black homelands in a prolonged government effort to wipe “black spots” from white rural areas.

Meanwhile, national police headquarters in Pretoria said that officers shot and killed a black man in a battle with stone throwers in the black Crossroads squatter camp outside Cape Town and fought black rioters in five other Cape province townships late Tuesday and early Wednesday.

A statement said nine blacks were wounded and 31 arrested later Wednesday when police quelled six outbreaks of arson and three of stone-throwing, mostly in Cape province.

About 900 people have been killed, nearly all of them black, in 15 months of violence against apartheid. Most have died in confrontations with police and soldiers, but about one-third are black policemen, township officials and others killed by blacks who see them as sellouts to the white government.

(Reuters news agency reported that black nationalist Winnie Mandela was admitted to a South African clinic Wednesday night on the advice of her doctor after feeling unwell recently. It quoted a telephoned statement from her lawyer, Ismail Ayob, saying her stay in the clinic would probably last only a few days.