Apartheid: Cracks in the Fa

ONE of the swingingest bars in Pretoria these days is in the Boulevard Hotel, which is home to diplomatic and technical delegates from black African nations. White Pretorians go there simply to meet blacks--something that they would not have dared to do even a year ago. Even more startling, Pretoria's hostesses now consider it a social must to have at least one black man at a party; as a result, the only resident black ambassador, Malawi's sherry-sipping, highly professional Joe Kachingwe, is being run ragged. Kachingwe's six-year-old daughter Chipo recently became the first black student admitted to an all-white primary school. When one right-wing weekly greeted the event with a front-page headline reading WHAT IS THIS KAFFIR DOING AMONG OUR SCHOOLCHILDREN?, most of the South African press hooted down the paper for reaching "new depths of tastelessness."

Loosening Logjam. Can this be South Africa, the land long marred by an ugly policy of apartheid (separateness), which enables 3,800,000 whites to exert total dominance over 15 million black Africans, 2,000,000 Coloreds (half-breeds) and 600,000 Asians? The structure of apartheid, which the late Prime Minister Daniel Malan and his largely Dutch-descended Nationalists began to build in 1948, still towers over everything. No black can stay in a "white" hotel, own land or property in white areas, belong to a trade union, own a home, or vote in a countrywide election. Black political development is restricted to eight Bantustans, or "homelands"--districts set apart for a portion of South Africa's blacks, where they are gradually being granted limited self-government under a policy of separate development. But this year, reports TIME Correspondent John Blashill, "the clear spring air of South Africa fairly crackles with talk of change. There are times in the life of every major nation when it is forced to stop in its tracks, take painful stock of itself and ask itself where it is going. For South Africa, such a time has finally come." Says Novelist Alan Paton, former leader of the banned Liberal Party: "There is a loosening of the logjam." Adds Helen Suzman, the opposition Progressive Party's only Member of Parliament: "For the first time in many years, I'm optimistic about the future of South Africa."

Fashionable Idea. The changes are more than symbolic. The government has promised new regulations that will effectively eliminate the hated "pass laws" that require all blacks to carry identity cards and severely restrict their movement; it was during a protest against these laws that police opened fire at Sharpeville in 1960, killing 67 blacks and injuring hundreds. The government-owned railway is ignoring laws against hiring nonwhites for skilled jobs; the local General Motors plant, whose labor force is 52% nonwhite, has been quietly doing the same thing for years. The Trades Union Council, the country's largest labor organization, has demanded that blacks be given the right to join unions and be paid the same wages as whites. Equal pay for equal work has been adopted by the city of Port Elizabeth, the Standard Bank and Barclay's Bank of London, and Polaroid. The idea has become, as the Johannesburg Star recently put it, "as fashionable as hot pants." But in many areas, it will take a long time to close the economic gap. White factory hands earn six times as much as blacks doing comparable work, white miners 17 times as much, and white teachers make more at the bottom of their pay scale than blacks at the top of theirs.

Cracks are gradually appearing in many of the petty forms of segregation with which apartheid has been buttressed. In Durban, the city council recently threw a multiracial cocktail party. In Johannesburg, a few adventurous whites have begun to take black friends to restaurants and bars; they are often stared at, but invariably served. Last week South Africa's 8,000-strong Chinese community won the right, in a test case, to live in white areas "where this is permitted by the community." The prime reason for the change is economic. South Africa is rapidly industrializing, with more skilled jobs opening up than there are white workers to fill them, and is thus ever more dependent upon skilled black labor. If the laws reserving skilled work to whites were really enforced, or if blacks were transported en masse to the Bantustans, production lines would be crippled and trains would halt.

Moreover, 71% of South Africa's white electorate are aged 36 or under, and they are less affected than the older generation by fears of the swart gevaar, or "black peril." Seven of every ten Afrikaners are city dwellers, accustomed to seeing blacks not as savages but as urbanites like themselves. More whites are working alongside blacks; and if familiarity has not always bred respect, at least it has helped to reduce racial fears. On a national level, the country's black politicians have been concentrating on achieving black power in the Bantustans, a goal acceptable to the Afrikaners. Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, 42, chief minister of Zululand, last month told white students at Stellenbosch University that "if the majority of whites have now decided to set up blacks in separate states, we have no means to resist it, even if we wanted to." But, he declared, "it must be clear that we do not expect sham self-government, but the real thing." That approach, of giving blacks a political voice in the Bantustans, has eased the Afrikaner's fear of being overwhelmed by black demands in the rest of the country, and has slowly begun to erode the underpinnings of apartheid in the cities.

Tortured Prisoners. The foundations of apartheid are still too solidly entrenched to be done away with for a long time to come--if ever. The prison population is still the world's highest per capita, with 424,000 blacks behind bars, half of them for petty infractions of the pass laws. The jails also hold 800 persons who are officially classified as political prisoners. According to one recent account, the government still has 42 persons under house arrest and out of circulation, including a grandson of Gandhi (no newspaper can mention their names). In Pretoria, the terrorism trial of the Very Rev. Gonville ffrench-Beytagh, the Anglican Dean of Johannesburg, is now in its third month. In Natal, where 14 nonwhites are also on trial under the government's all-purpose Terrorism Act, the defense has charged that all of the prisoners and some of the government witnesses were tortured to make them talk.

In considering even the most minor relaxations, Prime Minister John Vorster must still take into account his Nationalist Party's dwindling but vocal right wing, known as the verkramptes (cramped ones). Vorster, 55, a cautious pragmatist during his five years in office, has already adopted a successful "outward-looking" foreign policy of providing trade and aid to black African states. Last month he declared: "Your government is now entering an era of the most practical politics South Africa has ever known. The time of speeches, blueprints and fancy flights has gone." The statement could have meant anything, but aides insisted that it was the Prime Minister's way of telling the verkramptes to fasten their seat belts for even bigger changes ahead.

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