Afrikaners to Meet Next Week in Senegal With Black Rebels

White South African dissidents said Friday that they will meet next week with black guerrillas of the outlawed African National Congress in the largest meeting ever between the apartheid opponents.

The conference in the West African nation of Senegal, arranged with the help of French President Francois Mitterrand’s wife, Danielle, will bring together 50 Afrikaans-speaking South Africans and “a high-powered delegation” of ANC officials, said Alex Boraine, a member of the white delegation.

The South African government said it knew of the planned July 8-11 meeting but was not consulted about it and had no comment. Pretoria usually frowns on such contacts, however, branding the ANC a terrorist movement dedicated to violent Marxist revolution.

The ANC, declared illegal in 1960, is headquartered in Zambia.

The conference was organized secretly to avoid government action to prevent its taking place, but news of it leaked Thursday and was published in South African newspapers Friday.

The Star newspaper said the French government was closely involved in arranging flights and visas for the South Africans, whose passports are not accepted in most black African states.

Despite government objections, several South African delegations have met with the African National Congress since the latest anti-apartheid unrest erupted in September, 1984.

The Senegal-bound group is headed by Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, a popular 47-year-old Afrikaner who headed the liberal opposition in Parliament until last year. He quit mainstream politics then because they did not involve the country’s black majority.

Slabbert said in an interview that he regards the meeting as a milestone in the quest for a negotiated solution, because, “for the first time, descendants of the Afrikaner Boer republics, born and raised within the ideal of Afrikaner nationalism, will be talking to their exiled fellow South Africans who represent the oldest liberation movement on the continent.

“They do not accept all the actions and strategies of the ANC, but they acknowledge that the ANC forms an integral part of any successful resolution of the conflict in South Africa,” Slabbert said.

Boraine, who quit Parliament along with Slabbert, said identities of other participants will be announced Tuesday in London. “It is a wide range of academics, church people, professional people, political people, even artists and writers,” Boraine said.

Over the years, many Afrikaners have become convinced that apartheid must go.