S. Africa Official Leads Apartheid Protest Swim

Cabinet Minister Allan Hendrickse, the leader of the mixed-race branch of Parliament, led about 100 people of mixed race Sunday into the ocean at a whites-only beach in Port Elizabeth to protest apartheid.

Hendrickse arrived at King’s Beach, which is reserved for whites, wearing a swimsuit and robe. No white sunbathers were on the beach at the time. Members of the whites’ right-wing Reformed National Party, which opposes desegregation of public facilities, attended the demonstration but did not intervene.

“Where we are at the moment is where the Colored (mixed-race) people used to camp,” Hendrickse said. “They were moved from here to beyond Cape Recife, then they were moved right out the other side of the city. We are just saying now we are tired of being shifted around.

‘God’s Beach’

“We are definitely pulling out of the tricameral Parliament if the Group Areas Act is not changed,” he added, wading into the water. When he came ashore, Hendrickse proclaimed, “This is God’s beach.”

Hendrickse is minister without portfolio and chairman of the ministers’ council for Colored affairs in the South African government.

The Group Areas Act is a pillar of apartheid. The act, which divides the country into areas for living and working by race, controls whites, Asians and mixed-race people. The country’s Asian and mixed-race population totals nearly 4 million people.

But President Pieter W. Botha said in a report by the South African Broadcasting Corp. on Saturday that the principle of separate residential areas will never be surrendered.

Elsewhere on Sunday, the government’s Bureau for Information said that about 200 blacks stoned security forces in Bothshabelo township near Bloemfontein, the capital of Orange Free State, the country’s most conservative province. One black and eight security force members were injured, the bureau said. Four blacks were arrested.