‘Our Country . . . Coming Together’ : Segregation Walls Slowly Tumbling in South Africa

When Marie Swanepoel took her two grandsons to see the popular Australian film “Crocodile Dundee” here this month, it turned into an unexpected encounter with what her daughter later told her gently “has to be our country’s future.”

“I sat next to a black man,” the gray-haired widow said. “Even in the dark, I could tell he wasn’t white. It was the first time in my 62 years, I think, that I ever sat next to a black man. But it was all right--he and his children laughed at all the same parts in the movie that we did.”

The cinema where “Crocodile Dundee” was showing in suburban Johannesburg was opened to all races a few months ago, and after years of strict segregation, it now draws large, racially mixed audiences that, in Swanepoel’s words, “have no trouble whatsoever getting along with each other.”

Cinemas are currently the focus of broadening government, business and community efforts to increase racial integration in most of South Africa’s major cities and to end the “petty apartheid” that has excluded blacks from many public facilities, reserving them for whites.

Although still very much a divided society, with President Pieter W. Botha’s government maintaining segregated residential areas, schools and medical facilities, South Africa slowly is dismantling many of the other barriers--some legal, others physical--that have long separated the races here.

Owners of restaurants, bars and hotels were permitted to desegregate their facilities last year, and many in the country’s major cities quickly did so. Whites-only beaches around Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth and East London are being opened to blacks, in practice if not yet in law. And black entrepreneurs are now allowed to open stores and offices in most of the country’s central business districts.

These changes have come faster in the country’s major cities than in small towns, where segregation often remains strict, and visitors to Johannesburg like Marie Swanepoel, who lives in northern Transvaal province, are frequently surprised by how common racial integration has become in urban areas.

“Each visit I see many black and brown faces in places where there were only whites before,” Swanepoel said on her latest trip to see her daughter and grandchildren in Johannesburg. “It gives me the feeling that slowly our country, with all its different people, is coming together, although sometimes I am startled to find myself next to a black, like at the cinema, and have to tell myself to approach it as a small adventure.”

Majority Rule Sought

For blacks, however, the intensified struggle against apartheid is not simply to end racial discrimination, but to achieve full political rights, preferably a system of majority rule based on the principle of one man, one vote.

Blacks smile good-naturedly when they hear of Marie Swanepoel’s coming to terms with integration, and they treat each step, from restaurants to beaches to cinemas, as a test of white willingness to accept a “non-racial society.” But the real issue for them is political power, not gradual desegregation.

About 85% of the country’s movie houses are now integrated after threats by American and other international distributors not to supply films to segregated theaters. Those in communities where local officials will not permit desegregation are being closed, often with conservative whites insisting that they must fight a “threat to our way of life.”

The small town in northern Transvaal province where Marie Swanepoel lives has no movie theater of its own, and the cinema in nearby Pietersburg, one of South Africa’s most conservative white communities, was closed last month when the town council refused to let the owner integrate.

Some Taboos Die Hard

“People up there are still very much against ‘mixing it’ racially,” Swanepoel’s daughter, Christina Joubert, a former social worker, said of Pietersburg. “Often they get ferociously angry if they find blacks anywhere near them. Their attitude too often is that ‘if we have to share it, we don’t want it,’ and I am afraid of what will happen to us all if they cling to the old ways.

“In the cities, people are becoming more enlightened, and whites are more and more willing to accept blacks almost everywhere. There are still some taboo places, like the swimming pool and the hairdresser, but barring blacks from the public library or the municipal buses or the town hall is really crazy.

“Much of petty apartheid is simply racism, like making blacks give way to whites on the street or wait until whites were served at a store, and it always was racism,” Joubert added. “But whites are also concerned about being swamped by blacks--there are about 5 to 1--and, as a result, losing what we have been able to enjoy because there are just so many people. We whites have to learn to share, but it’s a slow process.”

The nation’s capital, Pretoria, seems to be the city most resistant to change. The city still has benches at bus stops marked “whites only.” But authorities in other major urban areas, particularly Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Pietermaritzburg, and the central government have pressed ahead with desegregation of public facilities over the past two years.

Integrated Travel

Durban recently joined Cape Town in integrating its municipal buses, and in Johannesburg buses on three routes have been opened to all races. The country’s trains have not been fully desegregated, but most now have integrated cars as well as whites-only cars. Most inter-city buses have been desegregated. And no longer, frequent black travelers say, do they find themselves seated together in the rear of airplanes in what many had complained was an unofficial form of segregation.

Many private clubs are admitting their first nonwhite members, most of South Africa’s major national parks and game reserves have been opened to blacks and the country’s only nudist resort has declared its readiness to accept all races.

Even in housing--the most politically sensitive area of racial segregation here--the government appears to accept the creeping integration of some downtown neighborhoods, where white landlords are quietly renting apartments to black tenants. In well-to-do suburbs, neighbors raise no objection to black businessmen who have leased or even bought houses in their companies’ names.

And the general synod of the powerful Dutch Reformed Church, which had long upheld racial segregation as divinely ordered, voted in October to admit all races, though it stopped short of approving a merger with its nonwhite “daughter” churches.

Process Speeding Up

Most Afrikaners, the politically dominant descendants of Dutch, French and German settlers here, belong to the Dutch Reformed denomination, and the synod decision, although still controversial, is already helping to speed up the process of desegregation.

Other churches along with many private groups had begun actively promoting racial integration years ago, not only rejecting segregation as immoral but also arguing that only through personal contacts between blacks and whites could the country’s problems be resolved peacefully.

Recent opinion surveys among urban whites show a growing readiness, particularly in such liberal cities as Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, for faster and wider desegregation, even in the controversial areas of residential neighborhoods and schools.

But conservative whites, especially in low-income urban communities and rural towns, are alarmed at the growing integration, expressing opposition not only to sharing facilities such as movie theaters with blacks but worrying that such moves will lead in time to “black domination” of them politically.

‘Another Communist Onslaught’

“What is happening here is another communist onslaught on our land,” Councilor Arrie van Wyk declared as the Krugersdorp Town Council considered the integration of the town’s two cinemas. By creating an “uproar” over opening the theaters to blacks, as the council eventually did, “liberals” were undermining the “right of whites to decide their own affairs,” he said.

Desegregation efforts have nonetheless become so widespread that when there is such local resistance as in Krugersdorp to a new step, it is front page news here. What a year ago would have been breakthrough decisions integrating municipal parks or public libraries or resort beaches are reported as almost commonplace developments.

Even when there are incidents--an Indian sailor prevented from riding a whites-only bus in Pretoria, a Colored (mixed-race) family ordered from a white beach northwest of Cape Town, a white farmer told that he could not eat at a hotel restaurant with his black foreman--the implicit “news” is that such trouble, when it still occurs, runs against the growing trend toward social integration.

“Apartheid is supposed to be ‘outmoded,’ according to the state president, and we are supposed to be getting rid of all the bits and pieces of petty apartheid that have been established over the years,” the Rev. Edward J. Manikkam, an Indian member of Parliament, said after he and his family were refused service at a restaurant at Melkbosstrand, north of Cape Town, because they were not white.

‘Bitter Fact of Life’

“Many of the regulations of petty apartheid have been repealed--there was no law against our having tea at that restaurant--and I think that most will be gone within a short time. . . . But, quite clearly, racial discrimination remains a bitter fact of life for those who are not white, and we are far from becoming an integrated society.

“Yet, even while we often fall quite short of this goal, the ideal is now there and growing,” Manikkam added.

Like other nonwhite members of the tricameral Parliament, Manikkam said he hopes that the government will soon repeal the 1953 Separate Amenities Act, which legalized segregated services, buildings and other facilities for different racial groups, as well as related regulations.

To press this demand, the Rev. Allan Hendrickse, chief minister of the Colored House of Representatives in Parliament and a member of Botha’s Cabinet, defied government regulations and swam at a whites-only beach at Port Elizabeth last month with other members of his Labor Party.

Unofficial Segregation

Despite a sharp rebuke from Botha, who forced him to apologize publicly, Hendrickse warned again this month that the Labor Party will reconsider its participation in the controversial tricameral Parliament at the end of this year if the Separate Amenities Act and other apartheid legislation have not been repealed.

Outside major cities, segregation remains common, particularly in small towns. In some communities, blacks must still use separate entrances at stores, police stations have “whites only” sections, post offices have separate “white” and “black” counters and restaurants will sell blacks food and drinks to take out but not let them eat there.

Even when a city has formally been desegregated, often it maintains separate facilities unofficially. In Johannesburg, for example, public toilets intended for blacks have signs showing a black man or woman on a white background and those for whites have signs with a white figure on a black background. Liquor stores have been desegregated, but most still have separate entrances and counters to serve blacks. Some beaches remain reserved for white residents, even in towns that opened facilities to all races.

And “right of admission reserved” signs remind blacks that integration is voluntary, not compulsory.

Culture Shock

“A black is expected to know his place, and that is an attitude that has been ingrained in all of us, blacks and whites alike, for decades,” says Sidney Moloi, a black engineer, who after studying and working abroad for nearly 10 years, went through “a tremendous culture shock” on his return.

“Living in the United States and Canada, I got used to thinking of myself as a person first, not necessarily a black. When I returned, I had to think of myself first as a black again if I wanted to take a taxi or go for lunch. . . .

“After being away for those years, I can see the changes, but this place is still a generation or two away from American-style integration.”

The South African government has no declared policy on integration, except that it should not be “forced,” and usually prefers to leave decisions on desegregation to local officials or to businessmen themselves.

Policy Remains Ambiguous

Botha, however, has said repeatedly over the last two years that he wants to end practices that the country’s black majority finds “discriminatory and hurtful” and that many whites, including leaders of the ruling National Party, now acknowledge as a major source of political tension here.

At a special federal congress last August, the party pledged itself in a new policy document to the legal protection of “everybody’s human dignity, life, freedom and property” and to “the elimination of any discrimination on the grounds of color, race, cultural affiliation or religion.”

Yet government policy remains ambiguous. After boasting of increased integration of the country’s armed forces, the Defense Ministry scrapped a project training white, Colored and Indian women recruits together for the navy because of their “youth and vulnerability.”

When parents at more than 20 white schools around Cape Town voted to integrate the student bodies, in what several--using government jargon--called “group self-determination,” the governmented vetoed the requests even though all the schools had vacancies.

Immediate Payoff

And President Botha himself recently prohibited a white school, again on grounds of maintaining its “cultural identity,” from hiring a Colored woman to teach computer science, although she was the only applicant and well qualified for the post.

“Of all the things we need to do, ending the social segregation of petty apartheid is perhaps the easiest and will have an immediate payoff,” a Nationalist member of Parliament said in Cape Town, asking not to be quoted by name because of “the extreme political sensitivity” of the issue before parliamentary elections in May.

“Ending petty apartheid would give the whole process of reform some of the credibility it lacks now in the black community. At the same time, gradual integration would accustom whites to sharing with blacks--sharing a restaurant or a cinema today, maybe sharing schools tomorrow and then sharing political power. This is a process that should be hastened but still not forced.”

Stoffel van der Merwe, the government’s deputy minister for information and a prominent member of the National Party’s liberal wing, described desegregation as “one of our quiet successes, something we can and do encourage but don’t force.”

Violent Incidents

“One of the remarkable things,” he added, “is how much we have been able to achieve without a lot of animosity and relatively few ugly incidents.”

Yet there have been incidents far worse than denial of service to blacks at nominally open facilities.

In Pretoria, three white men in a car, apparently angered by the blacks’ presence in a city park, allegedly ran down a maid and fatally injured her in December; although under investigation for homicide, they have not yet been charged.

In Durban and at Amanzimtoti, a popular resort south of the city, blacks clashed with whites and Indians on the city’s ocean-front beaches at Christmas, and riot police were called to restore order.

“There were just too many people for too little beach,” said a white lawyer who witnessed some of the Amanzimtoti fighting.

Mutual Understanding Needed

And, outside Johannesburg, a black passenger reportedly was thrown off a moving train by a conductor who wanted him to leave an integrated car.

Many of the incidents reported to police result from “members of other population groups wanting to use facilities still reserved for whites,” a police spokesman commented. “At other times, whites apparently do not understand that certain facilities have been opened to all racial groups.”

“Where friction occurs, the South African police attempt, while upholding the law, to bring about mutual understanding and respect,” the spokesman added, “and we believe we are making a valuable contribution in this regard.”

Even those who cite the desegregation as evidence of the government’s progress in promoting reform acknowledge that it remains slow and limited and does not deal with the fundamental issue of political power.

“Remember how far we have come when you assess how far we still have to go,” a senior government official commented in Cape Town, also asking not to be quoted by name because of the political sensitivity of the issue in the approaching elections.

A Matter of Time

“Not so long ago we had virtually total racial segregation throughout society, and hundreds and hundreds of laws and regulations to enforce it.

“Then consider how long it took the United States to integrate in the South where blacks are a minority. And then understand that we are also grappling with the fundamental and much more difficult problem of how to share political power with the blacks.”

Black leaders have said that desegregation, while important, will not persuade their people to forgo or defer their demand for an end to minority rule and a new political system ensuring them a full voice in national affairs.

“All these artificial barriers separating blacks from whites and whites from blacks will fall with one man, one vote,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu told newsmen in Cape Town this month. “When we solve the fundamental problem, all these lesser questions will be quite easily dealt with if, in fact, they still remain.

“And whites need not worry; when there is a democratic and non-racial government in this country, they will not be put into ghettos or made to ride at the back of the bus or subjected to the discrimination we have had to endure.”

Johannesburg Bureau researcher Michael Cadman also contributed to this article.