Barring of S. Africa Black From Track Meet Provokes Official Rebuke, Boycott

A top black high school athlete was barred Friday from taking part in South Africa’s national track-and-field championships over objections by the government, which said he had a right to participate.

Nkululeko Skweyiya, 17, who attends a prestigious and integrated private school near Durban, was told that Pretoria’s all-white Menlo Park High School, host for the weekend meet, would not allow any blacks to participate. He would have been the first black to compete in the games.

More than 100 fellow competitors from Natal, Skweyiya’s home province, immediately pulled out in protest, and the Southern Africa Sports Foundation withdrew its sponsorship of the games, reaffirming its commitment to multiracial sports.

Minister Disappointed

Stoffel Botha, minister of home affairs and the Natal leader of the ruling National Party, expressed shock and disappointment over the action, saying that Skweyiya had the “fullest right” to participate.

“Children have been deprived of an opportunity of meeting on the sports field, which would do a great deal for human relations,” Botha said in Cape Town.

But the Pretoria school reaffirmed its decision to permit only whites to compete, and government spokesmen said little could be done because, under South Africa’s present political system, the concept of home rule, known as “own affairs,” permits local communities to decide most questions of racial integration.

Carel van der Merwe, the Menlo Park headmaster, refused to discuss the case with newsmen, and the chairman of the school’s management committee could not be reached for comment.

Rightists Blamed

Some parents at Menlo Park, a well-to-do Pretoria suburb, suggested that members of the management committee of the far-right Conservative Party were responsible for the decision, but there was no confirmation of this.

Skweyiya, known as Squeegee, was to have competed in the high jump and long jump events as well as relay races as one of the best school athletes in Natal. Last year he took part in a national rugby tournament without incident. He is the son of a prominent black lawyer in Durban.

Skweyiya would have been the only black among more than 800 athletes, according to officials of the Southern Africa Sports Foundation.

The incident, recounted on the front pages of newspapers across the country, was immediately taken up by the government’s critics, who called it a national scandal and evidence that apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial separation and minority white rule, endures despite recent reforms, including efforts at desegregation.

Roger Burrows, a member of Parliament from the white opposition Progressive Federal Party, said the government should take such decisions away from local groups in an effort to speed racial desegregation.

Review ‘Imperative’

“It is important that racists choose whether they wish to participate in normal sports or be excluded,” Burrows said in Cape Town. “For racial peace and fairness, it is imperative that this distasteful decision be reviewed.”

There was widespread concern too that South Africa’s already severe isolation in international sports would be exacerbated as a result of the incident, which would be seen abroad as a continuation of racial segregation here.

“In one fell swoop, all the hard work that our sport administrators and sportsmen have done to normalize sport and keep a toehold in international sport has been jeopardized,” said Mike Tarr, another Progressive Federal Party member of Parliament.