S. Africa Court Orders School to Admit Blacks

In an echo of the United States’ civil rights struggle, a South African Supreme Court judge Friday ordered an all-white public school in a conservative rural community to admit black children whom the school had tried to prevent from enrolling.

Judge Theo Spoelstra ruled that white authorities at Potgietersrus Primary School, which has 764 white pupils in an Afrikaner-dominated town 150 miles north of here, had violated the country’s interim constitution by barring three black students from attending “on racial grounds.”

Government officials said they may deploy police or soldiers next week to ensure the safety of the new students.

Last month, a defiant group of khaki-clad whites stood in the doorway to block the three black children from entering and jeered at black protesters and reporters outside.

The high-profile case has been compared to Brown vs. Board of Education in the United States, in which the U.S. Supreme Court in 1957 ordered the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. National Guard troops were used to escort the first black students to that school as part of the nationwide ruling.

The Transvaal Supreme Court ruling marks the first time since South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy nearly two years ago that a court has grappled with the sensitive question of whether or how to desegregate the country’s school systems, which are still largely separate and unequal.

Under apartheid, the white-minority government spent far more money on schools, teachers and training for whites than for blacks in a deliberate attempt to provide cheap black labor for white-owned mines and other industries.

Although the policy has been scrapped, vast disparities remain because most whites and blacks still live in separate communities. That is the case in Potgietersrus, where 13,000 middle-class whites live in town while an estimated 100,000 mostly poor blacks live in a dusty township nearby.

The challenge came from Magiliweni Alson Matukane, the children’s father. An engineer educated at Vanderbilt University in Memphis, Tenn., Matukane moved to Potgietersrus last year for his job in the provincial department of water affairs.

After renting a house in a formerly all-white neighborhood, Matukane and his wife applied to the nearest primary school to enroll their children, ages 8 to 13.

The application was denied by white parents in the school’s governing body, and Matukane’s home was vandalized and sprayed with obscene graffiti.

Lawyers for the white parents denied racist motives, insisting in court papers that the school was already full. They also argued that the school “has an exclusively Christian Afrikaans culture and ethos” that could be “destroyed by admitting pupils from a different cultural background.”

In his 22-page ruling, however, Spoelstra called such arguments “so far-fetched as to border on the ridiculous.”

Spoelstra ordered school authorities to admit Matukane’s three children and at least 18 others who had been turned away. The judge also ordered the school to pay the legal costs of the black parents.

Although Education Minister Sibusiso Bengu hailed Friday’s ruling, President Nelson Mandela’s government has deliberately kept a low posture in the Potgietersrus case to avoid exacerbating the fears of some whites that it is seeking to wipe out Afrikaans culture and language.

But Danie Bisschoff, lawyer for the school, complained that Afrikaners are being victimized.

“Why should they discriminate against Afrikaner culture merely because we are white?” he asked at the courthouse.

But Ngoako Ramathlodi, the provincial premier, gave another view. At a news conference, he said he had told white parents to prepare their children for change.

“We cannot prepare them to exist or to live in a dinosaur age,” he said.