S. Africa Rail Commuters Try Desegregation

In a desperate rush to catch his commuter train a few months ago, Walter Moloto leaped under the “whites-only” sign into a first-class coach as it was leaving the station. It was Moloto’s first visit inside a white train car and, he hoped, his last.

The other passengers cursed him, a conductor grabbed him by the shirt and he was shoved out the door at the next stop. Moloto hurried back to the third-class cars, where for 40 years the law has said that black passengers in South Africa must ride.

But a few days ago, Moloto was stretched out on the cushioned seats of first class, surrounded by whites and quietly reading a newspaper.

‘Free to Go Anywhere’

“It’s nice to be able to sit where you like,” said Moloto, 27, who works as a police officer in Tembisa township. “And as long as I’ve got this first-class ticket, I feel free to go anywhere.”

“To me,” said Bennie Vorster, a white computer programmer seated across the aisle, “if they pay the same price, it’s no problem. I find the more decent, or shall I say ‘business-orientated,’ blacks use first class.”

The “whites-only” signs on South Africa’s commuter trains were pulled down recently, and, for the 1.5 million blacks and 200,000 whites who ride daily, another small piece of the system of racial separation known as apartheid disappeared.

While social segregation still permeates the small rural villages, the barriers are falling in South African cities--too slowly in the view of many blacks and too quickly for many whites. The dismantling of petty apartheid by desegregating such things as trains, buses, cinemas, beaches, restaurants and swimming pools carries on unabated.

Face Lift

The removal of those petty apartheid laws has given South African cities an important face lift, creating, on the surface at least, a more integrated, multiracial society. But the backbone of apartheid remains intact: By law, whites and blacks must live in separate neighborhoods, go to separate schools and use separate hospitals. And the country’s black majority has no national vote and no legal say in how, or whether, to end apartheid.

Still, a South African needs a score card to keep track of apartheid these days.

Happy Madlala recently boarded a bus for her technician’s job at the whites-only Johannesburg Hospital and was ordered off because she is black. The driver produced a newspaper article to prove his case, but she didn’t believe him and she pointed out two mixed-race Colored passengers on the bus.

Police Ruling

The driver headed straight for the police station where the matter was sorted out. Madlala, 27, had not realized that only three of the dozens of city bus routes are integrated or that, in a peculiarity of the law, people classified as Indians or Colored may ride Johannesburg buses reserved for either whites or blacks.

Madlala, who was not charged by police in the incident, would have been able to ride in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth or Durban, however, where buses were desegregated last year.

Many beaches were opened last year to all races, but a few remain restricted to “members of the white race group,” according to posted signs.

Public swimming pools remain segregated nearly everywhere in South Africa except in the Pietermaritzburg, where city fathers opened them to all races only six months ago.

Small-Town Restrictions

Such things as restaurants, public restrooms and hotels generally are open to all races in large cities but restricted in small towns. About 90% of the movie theaters in the country are open to all races and the national airline is fully integrated.

The abolition of “whites-only” suburban train coaches this July meant that, for the first time since train segregation was instituted in 1948, the color of a passenger’s ticket and not the color of his skin would determine where he could sit. Or where he could work: Black conductors, once restricted to “nonwhite” cars, now work everywhere.

“From now on, segregation will be based only on economic principles,” said J. C. van der Merwe, South African Transport Services manager in Johannesburg.

Economic segregation begins at the ticket counter in Germiston: Third-class commuters buy their tickets in a dimly lit hallway at a single window invariably marked by a long line. It is across the tracks from the first-class windows.

Like Subway Cars

The third-class coaches resemble some American subway cars, with passengers squeezed onto metal bench seats beneath the windows and, even during off-peak hours, dozens of others standing. Teen-age hawkers sell everything from apples to Afro combs and sometimes the passengers break out in song. Warnings not to lean on the train doors are written in both Zulu and Tswana.

One recent evening, Ednah Kumah, a black nurse at an old-age home in Springs, a small white town east of Johannesburg, saw seven whites among a throng of blacks in her third-class coach.

“When I saw these whites mixing with blacks on the train, I was shocked,” she said. “We are used to being around whites, but they are not used to being around us. We used to be shunted away, but now if they accept us, it’s good.”

Kumah says she’d like to see what first class is like.

‘Maybe Next Time’

“I don’t have enough money right now, but maybe next time,” she said.

For the 40-minute ride between Germiston and Johannesburg, first-class commuters pay 1.40 rand, or about 70 cents. Third-class passengers pay less than half that, the equivalent of about 30 cents. (Second class is available only on long-distance trains, which are still segregated.)

The first-class coaches, with soft bench seats facing each other, are often uncrowded and always sedate. The same warnings on the door are written in English and Afrikaans, the first language of most of white South Africa.

Moloto, the Tembisa police officer, said he thinks first class is worth the extra money just to be able to find a seat. But occasionally, he feels less than welcome there. One woman gathered her things and moved away when he sat across from her recently.

Afraid of Robbery

“I saw it in her eyes,” he said. “She thought I was going to rob her.”

The right-wing Conservative Party has warned that the desegregation of commuter trains is a threat to whites because, according to party transport spokesman Jurg Prinsloo, “It is a well-known fact that violence on black commuter trains is endemic.”

“I’m not against it as long as everything is in order, and there’s no danger to anyone,” said Edward Forber, a silver-haired man who was waiting with his wife, Sylvia, for a train to Pretoria.

The Forbers mirror the debate among white South Africans over the removal of petty apartheid.

“It’s live and let live. Like every other change in South Africa, it’s a matter of how they (blacks) behave,” said Forber, who came here in 1941 with Britain’s Royal Air Force.

‘Who Knows What They’ll Do’

“And we know how they behave--they don’t,” his wife said. “If they were like American blacks, who would worry? But our blacks? Who knows what they’ll do.”

Most black commuters interviewed recently said they hope the removal of “Whites Only” signs would bode well for South Africa.

“Maybe it’s only a seat now, but as time goes on, the whites can begin getting used to it,” Moloto said. “This is how we’re supposed to live.”

Petrus Gcinkosi, a 26-year-old insurance consultant who is black, says things “are finally coming right. We know some steps are left behind, but it is coming.”

If apartheid laws die slow and hard in South Africa, apartheid customs die even harder.

Outdated Signs

At a public toilet in downtown Johannesburg, signs showing a white man on a black background and a black man on a white background once designated the separate facilities. The law changed several years ago, but no one bothered to take the signs down until recently, and it remains rare for blacks or whites to cross those old color lines.

Liquor stores in Johannesburg once served whites inside the store and blacks out back. The rule has changed but not always the practice. At a liquor store in the well-to-do, white northern suburbs, for example, black domestic workers still use the outside counter.

A white person wanting to travel third class on a South African commuter train quickly runs into the assumptions of apartheid.

“A third-class ticket?” asked the surprised clerk, a white who sells only third-class tickets. Later, a black conductor, asked to point out the train to Johannesburg, directed the white passenger to the first-class waiting platform, more than 50 yards from the third-class--and formerly blacks-only--boarding area.

Color ‘Doesn’t Matter’

“It doesn’t matter what color a man’s skin is,” said Jenne Zilz, spokeswoman for the government department that runs the railways. “If he has a first-class ticket, he uses the facilities.” That includes toilets, waiting rooms, restaurants and taverns, she said.

Sometimes, though, the word takes a while to sift down.

In a tavern on the platform of the Germiston train station, a bartender with a few days’ growth of beard seemed surprised that blacks were allowed to ride in first class. But he said that didn’t change the rules of his establishment.

“I can’t serve blacks here,” he said. “There are thousands of them. If I served them, no whites could get in here. There would be trouble, punch-ups and the like.”

Where could blacks buy a drink, then?

He pointed out the door, toward the station exit.

“They have their own places down on the street,” he said.