Hated ‘Pass Laws’ Formally End : Black S. African’s Gain--’For 1st Time, I’ll Be Legal’

Samson Mogale was at the local office of South Africa’s Home Affairs Ministry well before it opened Tuesday, a day he had circled on his calendar in the hope that it would mark the “beginning of a brand new life” for himself and his family.

In his right hand, Mogale held a sheaf of completed government forms, a variety of well-worn documents, including his baptismal and marriage certificates, and two identity photos. He kept his left hand in his pocket to keep it from shaking with nervousness.

“I am about to become a person, a real person,” Mogale, 32, a shipping clerk, said. “For the first time, I will be legal, a citizen in my own country. . . . Well, maybe not a full citizen, like a white man, that is, but some kind of citizen.”

Until now, Mogale explained, he had not existed in the eyes of the law. Although he was born in Soweto, the black satellite city outside Johannesburg, his birth was never registered because his parents did not have government permission to live there. When he turned 16, he felt it too risky to apply for the “reference book” that blacks had been obliged to carry as identity documents to prove that they had permission to live and work in urban areas.

So, for half his life, Mogale has turned the other way whenever he saw a policeman who might demand his dompass, as blacks called the reference book. He has left three jobs when labor inspectors demanded his pass. He had been arrested five times for not having a reference book or lacking permission to live in Soweto and work in Johannesburg. And he has been unable to register his five-year-old marriage or the births of his two children, to get a driver’s license, to apply for a house in Soweto or do dozens of other things that are part of normal life.

But this all changed on Tuesday, in the midst of a national state of emergency.

In the most sweeping reforms South Africa’s ruling National Party has yet introduced, the much-hated “pass laws” were repealed, reference books were abolished and restrictions were lifted on the movement of blacks to urban areas.

Other new measures, which also came into effect Tuesday, recognized as South Africans more than 2 million blacks who were previously regarded as citizens of tribal homelands and gave blacks the right to own property, not just lease it, in black townships and downtown business districts.

The authority of black municipal governments was increased, and blacks as well as Indians and Coloreds (persons of mixed race) were appointed to the country’s first multiracial provincial governments, which took office Tuesday.

Next month, the National Party will hold a special congress to discuss further political reforms, including a new multiracial national council to write a new “power-sharing” constitution for the country, and Parliament will then be reconvened to enact the legislation.

In the government’s view, Tuesday was “a historic day for South Africa,” state-run Radio South Africa said in a commentary. “Certainly, the day is symbolic of an era of unprecedented reform.”

Coincided With Violence

Yet the reforms, long sought by opponents of South Africa’s apartheid system of racial separation and minority white rule, coincided with a new round of violence.

A bomb left in a wire litter basket exploded at lunchtime at a bus stop in downtown Johannesburg, wounding six women, a 3 1/2-year-old girl and a 2-week-old infant. The government’s information bureau blamed the bomb, the eleventh to explode around South Africa in the past three weeks, on the outlawed African National Congress, the main guerrilla group fighting minority white rule.

The main criticism of the government’s step-by-step reforms is that they do not give the country’s 25-million black majority a full share of political power but instead leave control of the country with the 5 million whites.

“Are these pass laws really lifted, or is it just another game of pretend--that’s a real question,” Albertina Sisulu, president of the United Democratic Front alliance of anti-apartheid groups, said in an interview in Soweto on Tuesday. “We don’t know that the dompass won’t come back in another form. . . .

‘Want to Be Free’

“The real issue, however, is freedom. We want to be free--free not just of the pass laws, but of all the apartheid laws and of the system that has oppressed us for so long. Our struggle is about freedom, not just the dompass.”

Many other apartheid laws, including those requiring the “racial classification” of all South Africans and the segregation of residential areas, schools and many public facilities such as hospitals, remain in force. Recognition of many more blacks as South African citizens gives them, at best, only a voice in local government, for they remain excluded from political power on a national level.

Protests against the pass laws led to the fatal police shooting of 69 blacks at Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, in March, 1960, and then to the outlawing of the African National Congress and the other major anti-apartheid group, Pan Africanist Congress of Azania.

Recalling the Sharpeville massacre, Helen Suzman, a veteran member of Parliament from the opposition Progressive Federal Party, remarked, “Now, 26 years later, we are abolishing the pass laws, and the National Party is telling us what a mistake it was ever to have imposed them.”

For most blacks, the pass laws, enforcing their subservient status, had long been among the most hated elements of apartheid. They prevented rural blacks from moving to the cities to seek work and a better life and kept urban blacks in the thrall of a vast white bureaucracy that seemed to regulate every important aspect of their lives.

250,000 Arrested Annually

An average of 250,000 blacks had been arrested annually in recent years on various pass law offenses, which were punishable by fines of $45, roughly a week’s pay, and jail terms of up to 90 days.

“Without that pass, you don’t want to walk farther than next door to your neighbor’s,” said Frank Tsele, 44, who had a properly endorsed reference book but was standing in line with Samson Mogale to get a new “common identity document” the government will now issue blacks and whites alike.

“Man, I have seen the police ask everyone on a train for his pass, and I know people who have never come to town (Johannesburg) for fear of being arrested,” Tsele said. “Oh, I’ve always been legal, more or less, but I hate this damn book so much I can’t wait to get rid of it. . . . Maybe the new book can still be used against us, but at least I know that a white man will have to have one, too, even if he can leave it home in the cupboard.”

Gerrie van Zyl, director general of the Home Affairs Ministry, said in Pretoria that about 152,000 blacks had already applied for the new identity documents and that the first ones would be issued this week.

Hopes for Acceptance

While opposition to the reform had come from some black militants, who see the government as substituting such small steps to avoid fundamental changes, Van Zyl expressed hope that the move would win acceptance, first, as a gesture of good will recognizing blacks as “fellow South Africans” and, second, as an attempt to “make life easier all around.”

Even such sharp critics as the Rev. C. F. Beyers Naude, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, urged that “these reforms should not be seen as purely cosmetic.”

Naude said that President Pieter W. Botha, from the perspective of his white constituency, had “displayed remarkable courage to tackle these issues,” many of which were at the core of apartheid policies that had brought the Nationalists to power in 1948 and kept them there for nearly four decades.

“The tragedy of these reforms is that they are seen by the majority of the people, and especially by the blacks, as too little, too slow and therefore too late,” Naude said, “whereas for many whites they are regarded as too radically revolutionary.”