Proposal Would Form Multiracial Government in South Africa Province

Moderate black and white leaders in South Africa’s Natal province agreed Friday on a constitutional framework for sharing political power in the province on the basis of majority rule.

Their proposal, unprecedented in South Africa, would establish a multiracial provincial government based largely on the principle of one man, one vote, effectively ensuring a black prime minister for the province and the quick repeal of most legislation enforcing apartheid there.

The proposed provincial constitution would nevertheless guarantee Natal’s white and Indian minorities at least three seats in a 10-member Cabinet and give them a veto over laws and regulations directly affecting their language, religion and culture.

To take effect, the Natal proposal must be approved by the central government, which has been suspicious of all “local option” solutions to the country’s racial crisis, and then accepted by Natal’s 7 million residents, nearly 6 million of whom are black.

Even so, Prof. Desmond Clarence, chairman of the Natal Indaba, as the constitutional convention was called, using the Zulu word for conference, described the results of eight months of negotiations as a political breakthrough for this strife-torn nation.

“It is my sincere belief that what we have achieved is a signpost to a new South Africa,” Clarence said at Durban, the Natal capital, “and it is my hope that the Indaba’s (proposals) might soon be mirrored elsewhere in our country.”

In its compromises between demands of black anti-apartheid activists for simple majority rule and those of moderate and even liberal whites for protection of what they call “group rights,” the draft constitution is certain to prove controversial. It is already under attack from both the radical left and the extreme right.

The United Democratic Front, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups with more than 3 million members nationwide, refused to take part in the talks. So did the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the nation’s largest labor federation. The outlawed African National Congress said from abroad that blacks want true majority rule on a nationwide basis, not just a share in provincial administration. The congress sees the Natal plan as a diversion from the real goal and a political sellout.

President Pieter W. Botha’s ruling National Party sent only an observer delegation to the talks, and it agreed reluctantly earlier this year to the effective merger of the Natal provincial government with that of the Kwazulu tribal homeland.

The conference approved the constitutional draft by a vote of 24 to 2, with 9 abstentions. The two negative votes came from Afrikaans business and cultural groups, which saw the plan as transferring power to the black majority. They rejected the minority safeguards as inadequate.

Government sources said that Pretoria might endorse the plan if the new provincial administration’s powers were further restricted to give the central government overall control of such politically sensitive matters as racially separate residential neighborhoods and schools.

Natal conference participants argue that Botha, whose own proposals for political reform are all but dead, will find it difficult not to accept the Natal plan. They also argue that if it wins broad local support, Botha may even try to adapt it for national use.

Even under the Natal draft as it now stands, Pretoria would retain full authority for defense, foreign relations, transport and communications, labor affairs, taxation and law and order in what the delegates envisioned as a centralized, tightly controlled federal system.

Under the plan, the provincial legislature would have wide powers in local affairs, including education, health and welfare, that most South Africans regard as the most politically sensitive.

“People are very excited that they have managed to reach an agreement,” Peter Mansfield, a white member of the conference’s constitutional committee, said Friday. “They don’t know what the government’s reaction will be, but there is a sense of history in the making. . . . This could be the start of major constitutional changes in South Africa.”

At the center of the Natal plan is a two-chamber provincial legislature. Members of a 100-member lower house would be elected on the basis of universal adult suffrage, with a proportional formula to ensure representation of all parties. The upper house would be composed of 10 members each from black, Indian, English and Afrikaans-speaking and nonracial groups, a total of 50.

The lower house would normally choose a prime minister from the majority party, but minority parties would choose half of the provincial Cabinet.

Blacks would clearly control the lower house, but whites would be assured of 40% of the seats in the upper house. The “cultural interests” groups in the upper house would have the authority to block legislation affecting their own “language, religion or culture.” Disputes would be appealed to the country’s Supreme Court.

“We have built vetoes into the system, but the whole idea is, in fact, to promote cooperation between the different communities,” said Dawid van Wyk, the Indaba’s organizing secretary and a professor of constitutional law at the University of South Africa in Pretoria.

The provincial constitution would contain a strong bill of rights, first published several months ago, that would guarantee civil liberties and could be used in court challenges as a legal basis for ending aspects of apartheid remaining in the province.

In other developments, the government strengthened its national state of emergency, now in its sixth month, by giving police the authority to prohibit any gatherings, including indoor meetings, not authorized by a local magistrate.

The new powers, plus some tightening of other emergency regulations, indicated to lawyers here that emergency rule will not be lifted soon. Louis le Grange, the outgoing minister of law and order, said in Pretoria that, while political violence had greatly diminished, a “revolutionary climate” still exists in much of the country, making emergency rule necessary.

Soweto’s mayor, Ephraim Tshabalala, quit the city council this week in protest over the action of white administrators in demolishing more than 100 shacks Wednesday in a shantytown he had helped establish to ease the community’s severe housing shortage.

“I want to be free,” Tshabalala said, handing in his resignation. “I want to be with the people.” His action brought hundreds of singing, chanting youths to his home and businesses, praising him for quitting the council, which is widely reviled in Soweto as part of the system of apartheid.

In the tribal homeland of Kwandebele, northeast of Pretoria, local legislators have elected a new chief minister, George Mahlangu, 35, a local businessman, to succeed the late Simon Skosana, who died two weeks ago. Mahlangu refused to commit himself on the controversial question of Kwandebele’s possible “independence” from South Africa--a cause championed by Skosana but rejected by many other political leaders and most residents of the impoverished rural homeland. Mahlangu defeated, 41 votes to 25, one of the leading opponents of the independence plan.

In Port Elizabeth, two blacks were sentenced to death six times each for killing a black community councilor and five members of his family in March, 1985, in apparent revenge for the police shooting of at least 19 people at Langa, near Uitenhage. The six were burned to death.

“You acted out of pure barbarism and must be punished,” Judge Thomas M. Mullins told the men, aged 21 and 26. “It is terrifying to think of practically a whole family of six healthy men being murdered merely because they were in disfavor.” Two other men and a teen-aged boy received prison sentences.