Nonwhites in Parliament Test Regime’s Reform Stance : S. Africa Lawmakers Stage Dining Room Sit-in

Thirty mixed-race members of South Africa’s Parliament, protesting the country’s policies of racial segregation, demonstrated with an hourlong sit-in Tuesday in a parliamentary dining room reserved for white lawmakers.

Led by the Rev. Allan Hendrickse, a member of President Pieter W. Botha’s Cabinet and chief minister of the Colored (or mixed-race) House of Representatives in the tricameral legislature, the group demanded that all facilities of Parliament be opened immediately to all its members.

With national attention now focused on Parliament, the protest poses a major political problem for Botha in his efforts to convince blacks and other nonwhites of his commitment to reform and the need to use established institutions, such as Parliament, to achieve it.

Botha is boasting in current newspaper advertisements promoting his reform program: “We are committed to equal opportunity for all. Equal treatment. And equal justice.”

Whites Fear ‘Swamping’

At the same time, however, capitulation to mixed-race demands that Parliament’s whites-only restaurant be opened to all races will be interpreted by whites across the country as proof that the government cannot protect them from being “swamped,” as they put it, by South Africa’s black majority.

“This is, first of all, a test of whether we are full members of this Parliament, equal to every other member,” said David Curry, another mixed-race minister, who was refused service in a smaller protest on Monday when Parliament opened, “but it is also a test of the National Party’s sincerity when it says that apartheid is ‘outmoded’ and finished.”

Another blow to reformers’ hopes came Tuesday from F.W. de Klerk, minister of national education and the Transvaal provincial leader of the ruling National Party, who flatly ruled out any integration of state-run schools as a means of easing racial tensions here.

Asked whether the government might consider voluntary school integration, perhaps to promote racial harmony or perhaps simply to use surplus white classrooms and teachers, De Klerk replied:

“Not in government schools . . . as long as our party stands where it stands.”

To Upgrade Black Schools

The government is planning to invest large sums in upgrading the black education system to the point where it is equal to the white and is willing to subsidize private integrated schools, De Klerk said, but is pledged to maintain the racially segregated schools.

“I am not against people getting to know each other,” he told foreign correspondents. “I am not against interaction by people, including youth, of various population groups. . . . But the solution of South Africa’s problems does not lie in integrated education.”

De Klerk reiterated the point later during a debate on government policies in Parliament’s white chamber, telling the House of Assembly that integration would only bring more conflict to South Africa and citing recent tribal conflicts, black attacks on Indians in Natal province and the militancy of the extreme right wing.

But the annual debate on government policy as outlined last week by Botha in his opening address to Parliament was overshadowed Tuesday by the protest of the mixed-race lawmakers.

Silverware Snatched Away

As they filled about a third of the tables in the elegant dining room at lunchtime Tuesday, its white managers refused to serve them even a glass of water and sent the black waiters scurrying to strip silverware, napkins and plates of salad from each table.

“We were treated like dirt, something filthy that was spoiling this lovely white restaurant,” said Peter Hendrickse, the minister’s son and himself a member of the Colored house of the racially segregated Parliament.

“We felt that the only reason they did not bring in the police with their clubs and dogs and tear gas was that it would disrupt, even more than we had, the lunches of the white members.”

After the hour, the mixed-race lawmakers left without incident, but the whole affair immediately became the focus of debate both in their chamber of Parliament and in the Indians’ House of Delegates.

“Whatever the state president may say about apartheid being finished, dead and buried, we can see that it is alive and well in this very building, in Parliament itself and in his own National Party,” Anwar Essopafter, a member of the Indian house, declared. “Why did they bother to bring us into Parliament if they wanted to keep treating us as coolies?”

Credibility at Stake

The issue is of critical importance for the Colored and Indian politicians whose credibility is at stake. Eighteen months ago, they came into the tricameral Parliament, which is controversial because blacks are excluded, and vowed to dismantle South Africa’s apartheid system of racial segregation and minority white rule from within. Now, they are being asked what they have accomplished and are ridiculed for accepting discrimination even within Parliament.

Johan Greeff, the white Speaker of Parliament, rebuked the mixed-race legislators for their dining-room protest. They were not excluded from the dining room on the basis of race, Greeff said, but because it is reserved for the House of Assembly, the all-white chamber of Parliament. There are other, multiracial dining rooms in which Coloreds may eat, he added.

“The principle that applies is that outsiders to the particular house are excluded from its facilities and not that other races are kept out,” Greeff said. “It has nothing to do with apartheid.”

The mixed-race lawmakers were particularly angered when several members of the white opposition Progressive Federal Party, which is quick to proclaim its liberalism when attacking the government, continued their lunches, ignoring the sit-in a table or two away.

“Just what is the difference between the members of the National Party, those racists in the Conservative Party and our supposed friends of the Progressive Federal Party,” asked Dennis de la Cruz during the debate in the House of Representatives. “The answer, I suppose, is that a black man is quite welcome as long as he doesn’t move in next door.”

One Progressive Federal member, Horace van Rensburg, refused to continue his lunch after the protest began and later declared that he would not eat in the segregated parliamentary dining room again until it serves Coloreds and Indians as well as whites.