This Is One Time They Shouldn’t Be Rushing It

They can still segregate schools in South Africa. They can still have an all-white election, conscript an all-white army, pay lower retirement pensions to blacks than to whites. No land is being returned to any of the 3.5 million blacks forcibly removed from their property.

The police no longer can arbitrarily detain anti-apartheid activists and throw them into solitary confinement for 90 days without trial, true. For 10 days, however, they stillcan.

So pardon me, but it is too soon to give three cheers to South Africa.

Some already have. Sam Ramsamy, who of late has championed South Africa’s bid to be readmitted to the Olympic Games after previously endorsing the sanctions against it, is one of those who was thankful Tuesday when the International Olympic Committee removed the protective seal from its five Olympic rings. The head of South Africa’s new Olympic committee said: “There is a lot of international goodwill for South Africa right now.”

The wide--and white--world of sports is rolling out a red carpet. Wasting no time, South Africa already has requested acceptance to participate in the World Track and Field Championships in Tokyo later this summer.

How eager everyone is to forgive and forget.

Even President Bush is prepared to lift economic sanctions against South Africa, as if abolishing apartheid and promising to abolish apartheid were one and the same.

Yet, ask a typical member of the African National Congress if all these kinder, gentler sentiments of President Frederik W. de Klerk’s proposed amendments to South Africa’s internal security laws are extensive enough. Chances are, he or she will say no.

And an American civil rights attorney, Gay McDougall, agreed, saying Tuesday: “It is too early to reward President De Klerk. Over the past year and a half, he has made a lot of grand proposals and has taken a lot of half-measures. As long as there remains a reasonable doubt, the sanctions should remain in place.”

Instead, the IOC has already negotiated a multimillion-dollar deal with a South African broadcasting company for rights to the 1992 Olympic Games, its first TV contract with thatnation.

I am uncertain with what volume money talks. Golfers, auto racers, track and field athletesand others have at times been unable to resist the pots of gold at South Africa’s end of the rainbow, justifying their actions by refusing to acknowledge any relationship between politics and sport.

At the opposite end of the spectrum were athletes such as Lloyd Honeyghan, a boxer from the United Kingdom, who in 1986 was threatened with the confiscation of his world welterweight championship because he refused to fight South Africa’s top contender.

Honeyghan said at the time: “No one likes politics carrying into sport, but with the present situation in South Africa, I do not think we should have anything to do with them until life changes there. I was offered $500,000 and full expenses to fight in South Africa, but as far as I was concerned, that would just be blood money.”

Has life changed there?

South Africa’s June 21 Parliamentary vote evidently has persuaded enough people, including Olympic officials, that it has.

I only wish I could believe it.

Racism exists in every nation, near and far, but we are speaking here of one particular nation that has prevented blacks from purchasing land in certain districts for nearly 80 years, a nation that will continue to permit neighborhoods to specify their own “norms and standards” that discriminate against black property buyers, and a nation in which a school principal may continue to turn away a black child at the door.

Should we not at least wait to see how this “new” South Africa progresses before we approve of all this so-called progress?

South Africans are back carrying the Olympic torch, but that does not necessarily mean they have seen the light.