4 Areas in S. Africa Integrated
President Frederik W. de Klerk declared four neighborhoods multiracial today in the first move allowing South Africans of all races to legally live together after nearly four decades of enforced segregation.
Chipping away at a pillar of apartheid, De Klerk opened tracts of land in Cape Town, Durban and two areas near Johannesburg under the Free Settlement Areas Act, approved by Parliament last year under former President Pieter W. Botha.
The areas included the 237-acre District Six in the heart of Cape Town, where bulldozers razed thousands of homes in the 1960s to rid South Africa’s oldest city of a community of 33,000 and force its nonwhites to move miles away.
Except for a handful of churches and mosques, a technical school and a white housing project, District Six has stood vacant since then as a grim reminder of the Group Areas Act of 1950, which regulated where South Africans might live on the basis of race.
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