Possible Model for Rest of Nation : Some S. Africa Cities Curb Apartheid on Their Own

As South Africans search for a way out of their deepening crisis, many are asking to be allowed to end apartheid in their own communities--and perhaps become the model for the rest of the nation.

East London’s City Council voted recently to stop enforcing the Group Areas Act, which dictates racial segregation in housing. It is one of the foundations of apartheid. The move goes beyond the city’s powers, however, and thus is merely a request to the central government.

Durban, which has retained one multiracial neighborhood for 30 years in spite of apartheid legislation, now wants to create another one as an “open area” in which all races may live. Cape Town is considering similar measures.

Meanwhile, there have been suggestions within the ruling National Party that racial segregation in public facilities--now required under the Separate Amenities Act and other apartheid legislation--should be made a matter of local option so that each community may move at its own speed toward integration.

Government-sponsored legislation is before Parliament that would allow hotel, restaurant and bar owners to integrate their facilities if they wish, and dozens of movie theaters in major cities won permission recently to admit blacks.

The local option movement began with Cape Town’s decision a year ago, over considerable opposition, to desegregate its public beaches. Now, requests are starting to come from some of the country’s top whites-only public schools, asking for permission to enroll black students, as most private and church schools have done for nearly a decade.

But the most far-reaching local option proposal has come from the leaders of Natal province and Kwazulu, the Zulu tribal homeland. They have called for power-sharing arrangements that many think could become a model for other regions and perhaps the country as a whole.

“We badly need the kind of politics in which blacks and whites at the local and regional levels can implement (programs) together, and we badly need to do so with the blessing of the government,” Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the chief minister of Kwazulu, said earlier this month in presenting the long-awaited proposal for a “joint executive authority” for the region.

The Kwa-Natal plan, as it is called, is certain to draw criticism from militant blacks because it builds, at least initially, on apartheid structures and stops short of the principle of one-man, one-vote. And it will draw the criticism of conservative whites because it gives blacks unprecedented power in Natal.

Buthelezi, however, sees this as a way of breaking the cycle in which whites prescribe new constitutions for the country and blacks reject them. Buthelezi hopes this will ease South Africa into political integration. He says that he believes there is still enough good will among whites and blacks in Natal for a political accommodation to be reached more easily there than elsewhere and that the region must move quickly before the opportunity is lost.

“I am not arguing that our proposals will wave some kind of magic wand,” Buthelezi said. “All I am saying is that our proposals establish a political arena in which the scales are at least tipped somewhat toward the politics of negotiation. . . . I hope it will be the first giant step toward the sharing of power.”

Buthelezi and Natal’s white politicians want to take the Kwa-Natal plan much further and perhaps establish a joint legislative body. They will open negotiations on the next steps April 3 in Durban.

J. Christiaan Heunis, the nation’s minister for constitutional development and planning, welcomed the Kwa-Natal initiative, which will require Cabinet approval and new legislation. It incorporates many of Heunis’ own ideas, such as government based on consensus among different racial groups.

If Kwa-Natal succeeds, many political scientists here see it becoming the first of a series of regions, each with its own political system and its own approach to the dismantling of apartheid, that will eventually form a South African federation. Federation is one of the much-discussed constitutional possibilities.

“The Kwa-Natal option has massive support from the Kwazulu government, Inkatha (the Zulu political organization), the Natal provincial council and local authorities plus the sponsorship of a high-profile Chief Buthelezi,” said Prof. Lawrence Schlemmer of the University of Natal, one of the country’s leading social scientists. “If it doesn’t work, then nothing else will.”

Jan Lombard, a deputy governor of the South African Reserve Bank and a man of considerable political influence in National Party circles, told a recent conference of businessmen that “for most thinking people, it has become clear that an appropriate legitimate constitution would be a regional federation.”

“To move to such a dispensation from our present centralized unitary system would need a very great devolution of power away from the central government,” Lombard said. “At the same time, it would need a great deal of integration of political power among people of all races on the regional level. Power would basically be separated then, not along racial lines but along regional lines.”

Among black leaders, however, only Buthelezi, who as chief minister of the Zulu homeland and leader of the country’s 6 million Zulus can negotiate from a position of strength, has so far expressed interest in a federal solution for South Africa.

Most blacks still insist on a “handing over of power by the apartheid regime to the people” and on “one-man, one-vote in a unitary state” as the starting point for the country’s future political system. To them, a federal system is another attempt by whites to retain power.

Heunis, who was asked by President Pieter W. Botha six months ago to come up with a number of “embryonic constitutional formulas” for discussion, avoids references to a federation. The concept has long been opposed by the National Party, yet Heunis leaves the impression that it is the likely result of current political trends.

Heunis, who oversees the government’s political reform program, has strongly opposed some moves for other forms of local option, particularly the dropping of racially segregated residential areas and the incorporation sought by some white cities of neighboring black, Indian or Colored (mixed race) townships.

Tough Party Stand

Other government ministers have declared, with Botha’s backing, that as long as the Nationalists are in power, residential areas, schools and some other facilities controlled by whites will never be integrated.

Scolding the East London and Durban city councils for their resolutions on relaxing the Group Areas Act, Heunis said the councils “do not have the jurisdiction to make decisions of this nature” and that such actions only “create confusion” among blacks who do not understand why they are not implemented and who then see the central government as blocking the reforms.

But local city councils, chambers of commerce and other white groups are often under greater pressure than the central government to implement changes; they face consumer boycotts, general strikes and student protests.

Lengthy consumer boycotts, for example, bankrupted many in the white business communities of East London, Port Elizabeth and many other cities in eastern Cape province last year--and made many merchants there fervent apostles of reform.

Some white communities, particularly in eastern Cape province, one of the country’s most troubled regions, have gone further and asked the central government to incorporate adjacent black townships within their borders and allow them to develop their own systems for handling local affairs. That, in effect, would mean political power sharing on the municipal level.

One of Johannesburg’s richest suburbs, Sandton, has similarly requested the incorporation of a neighboring Indian community, a move that would bring a major improvement in services for the Indians as well as one or two seats on the Sandton town council. It has also had discussions on cooperation with Alexandra, the impoverished and riot-torn black township that adjoins it.

None of these requests have been approved by the central government, and Heunis’ aides and others provide a variety of reasons for their reluctance to encourage the local option movement.

“Suppose the East London City Council were allowed to suspend the Group Areas Act there,” one of the government’s reform planners said. “But then suppose that a new city council were elected and reversed all the decisions. What would happen to those blacks, Coloreds and Indians who bought houses in what had been and were again now white areas? Would they be thrown out?

‘Passions Would Run High’

“A related problem would be the danger that race would be the No. 1 issue at every local election, and passions would run high all the time. Housing costs would rise in some suburbs as nonwhites moved in, but they would drop in others. Right-wing parties would be there all the time promoting swart gevaar (roughly, the black threat) and naked racism.”

A leading constitutional lawyer, who advises the government and for this reason asked not to be quoted by name, raised another problem: Since the Group Areas Act is the basis for the present tricameral Parliament, which has separate houses for whites, Coloreds and Indians but none for blacks, what would happen if residential neighborhoods were integrated?

“Who would represent whom?” he asked. “In effect, we would be scrapping the present constitutional system without substituting another dispensation for it. We would have created a political vacuum and added to our present instability.”

More Complex Patchwork

Other critics see the widespread exercise of local option, should it be adopted, turning South Africa into an even more complex patchwork quilt, with integrated communities next to those still rigidly segregated and with “gray areas” interspersed. From one town to the next, one suburb to the next, people would not be certain what to expect, these critics say, and this would lead to even more conflict than the country is now experiencing.

But Nic Olivier, a member of Parliament from the liberal white opposition Progressive Federal Party and its spokesman on constitutional affairs, wants to push for local option as widely as possible.

Olivier says that such “liberal” cities as Cape Town, Durban, East London, Port Elizabeth--and perhaps Johannesburg as well--would begin giving blacks, Indians and Coloreds access to all the public facilities that are still racially segregated and would declare at least some neighborhoods “open” to all races.

School integration, by far the most sensitive issue, would most likely be left to parents, on a school-by-school basis. But it is thought that such integration would probably come quickly after nonwhites were permitted to move into previously all-white neighborhoods.

Piet Badenhorst, a National Party member of Parliament and Heunis’ deputy, said earlier this month that the government wants to use the “principle of voluntary association” as the basis for scrapping apartheid--a formula the local option movement welcomes.

Lingering Resistance

While Badenhorst sees segregation disappearing quickly in the country’s major cities and most of Natal, he warned that residents of many small towns might cling to apartheid for many years yet.

“It is absurd to say that we can have power-sharing on the national level, on the regional level, but not with the people who are part of our own community, who may live just down the road,” a white businessman commented last week in Port Alfred, one of the small communities, which has asked for the incorporation of its outlying “African location.”

“But there are those, I know, who want to keep the black man at arm’s length, and they are, quite frankly, frightened by the prospect of dealing with blacks at close quarters, particularly when it means change for their own communities. To my mind, though, that will be easier than trying to devise some complicated constitution that is all theory. They ought to let us get on with the job of learning to live together.”