S. Africa Panel Recommends Voluntary Integration in Residential Areas

A legislative commission Thursday recommended the gradual and voluntary integration of South Africa’s residential areas through a major liberalization of the nation’s system of racial separation.

The constitutional affairs committee of the President’s Council, a legislative and advisory body, proposed that local governments be allowed to decide whether a neighborhood should be integrated. But it added that those suburbs wishing to remain racially segregated must be allowed to do so.

Although the changes would initially benefit mostly those blacks with enough money to buy houses in well-to-do white suburbs willing to accept black residents, government officials said they believe the proposed changes constitute an important breakthrough for President Pieter W. Botha’s step-by-step approach to political, economic and social reforms.

As the number of integrated neighborhoods slowly increases, the committee envisions a growing number of integrated schools and probably the first non-racial elections for integrated municipal councils.

No Large-Scale Change

But there would be no immediate or large-scale move away from the system that keeps most of the country’s urban blacks in crowded and impoverished townships that for many people sum up the results of minority white rule and that make full repeal of the Group Areas Act a major demand of the anti-apartheid movement.

“The government realizes that it cannot continue to rule with old-style apartheid, so it is making minor adjustments,” said Azhar Cachalia, treasurer of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of 750 anti-apartheid groups. “This falls well short of any real, fundamental change.”

The President’s Council committee also urged the repeal of a 1953 apartheid law segregating most public facilities, although it stressed that this was not a call for “forced integration,” particularly of privately owned amenities.

And it recommended the immediate opening of all areas zoned for commercial, industrial, professional and other non-residential uses to blacks, a move largely intended to permit them to compete equally with whites in the retail market. It similarly urged that black farmers be allowed to buy agricultural land in some areas that have been reserved for whites for more than 70 years.

Botha Repeats Stand

Although the government is expected to accept the committee’s major recommendations and to introduce legislation implementing them next year, President Botha reiterated his commitment to the concept of “group rights” to protect the white minority and to continued segregation in housing, schools and some facilities to preserve group identity.

“The government stands by the principle that opportunities to form one’s own community, to have one’s own community life and to possess one’s own areas must be guaranteed to those who regard this as being important,” Botha said in a statement. “The established rights of the individual and of communities must also be protected.”

But Botha, in a shift away from his past insistence on group rights as the cornerstone of South African politics, said that it must be possible as well “to make provision for those who prefer a different life style.”

He warned, however, that the recommendations “should not be regarded as a green light to act in contravention of the existing laws” while the government studies the report and prepares legislation to implement it.

Warns on Sudden Shift

Andries J. G. Oosthuizen, the committee chairman and a member of Botha’s National Party, said at a press conference that if the Group Areas Act were repealed entirely and immediately, South Africa could be faced with serious friction and possibly violence between blacks and whites, particularly politically conservative, low-income whites.

“There are very strong feelings in the white community that they could be overwhelmed by people from another (racial) group moving into their areas so that the character of the area could be dramatically changed,” Oosthuizen said.

“You need to have an appreciation for a historic situation that has developed over the centuries. If you totally uproot the existing system, you will just be looking for insecurity and trouble. We are looking for an evolutionary approach.”

Despite the limited nature of the proposed liberalization and the government’s firm commitment to group rights, the proposals are certain to meet strong opposition from the Conservative Party when they are debated in the President’s Council and later this month in Parliament.

The Conservative Party’s Jan Hoon told the council that stricter enforcement of the present law is needed, not its relaxation, “so that every person knows where he belongs.”

Want Faster Change

The recommendations are also drawing severe criticism from the left on grounds that the Group Areas Act, enacted in 1950 under the Nationalists but based on a century of earlier legislation, should be repealed immediately, not amended, and that apartheid must be dismantled entirely.

“The Group Areas Act has sown mass misery and bitterness and set the stage for revolution,” Robin Carlisle of the liberal white Progressive Federal Party said. “ ‘Local option’ as defined in the report has historically been a tool to entrench racism.”

Fifteen of the council’s 60 members walked out of the first day of its debate on the report. The Progressive Federal Party was joined by most members of the parties representing Indians and mixed-race Coloreds in the racially segregated, tricameral Parliament. Six of the committee’s 19 members had refused to sign the report.

“Unless there is a repeal, a total repeal, then we are not prepared to support this government in any way,” said the Rev. Allan Hendrickse, leader of the Labor Party, which controls the Colored house in Parliament and is threatening to delay passage of government legislation in a feud with the Nationalists.

Urge Repeal of Law

“For us, the bottom line is repeal of the Group Areas Act. We are prepared to look and negotiate and perhaps compromise on other things . . . but they should also meet our demands for recognition of the right of the individual to reside where he wants and associate with whom he wants.”

But the National Party is confident that it has more than enough votes to approve the report in the President’s Council and then enact the resulting legislation.

Under the proposed system, local governments would decide which neighborhoods, which suburbs and perhaps which towns would be declared open residential areas according to procedures similar to those now used to make decisions on land use, town planning and zoning.

In areas still zoned for members of one race only, restrictive covenants would be written into title deeds to prevent the sale of a property to members of other races, but local governments could grant exceptions just as they now permit zoning variances.

“There will be a much freer mix across the color line in upper-income strata than in lower-income areas, where the poor and the old do not have the money to move out if they do not like the change in the neighborhood,” Oosthuizen predicted. “Some areas will definitely want to become integrated and open to all. . . . Younger people are looking at this question in different ways from the old generation.”

Because new housing developments can be declared open areas from the start, government officials believe that projects planned by American, British and other European companies for multiracial communities in Johannesburg and Cape Town may now proceed.

Result of 3-Year Study

The committee’s recommendations grew out of a three-year study that the council undertook at Botha’s request in an effort to match the growing urgency of broad reform with the fears of the country’s 5 million whites about being “swamped,” as they put it, by its 25 million blacks.

Botha is also faced with demands from Colored and Indian politicians who joined the tricameral Parliament despite considerable criticism and now, as Hendrickse said, want their risks rewarded. South Africa has about 3 million Coloreds and almost 1 million Indians; over the years, about 530,000 Coloreds and Indians have been forcibly removed from their homes in areas reserved for whites and resettled in their own group areas.

The government is faced, too, with the need to permit interracial couples, who have been allowed to marry since 1985, to establish homes in communities that are not racially segregated.

Finally, it has been embarrassed by the recent growth of “gray areas,” particularly in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, where Africans, Coloreds and Indians live openly in defiance of the law in neighborhoods officially reserved for whites. Black business executives and professionals have also been moving increasingly into upper-class white neighborhoods in search of better housing.

But the committee said that repeal of the act after so many years of segregation “might give rise to misunderstandings and friction that could disturb order and stability and endanger the security of many, particularly during times of unrest.”

“Such a step would ignore present realities and the political climate,” the committee said, rejecting total repeal of the act in favor of its amendment or replacement with new legislation. “This would be unacceptable to the majority of whites. It would be the lower-income groups, particularly among whites, that would feel threatened. . . .”