A Partial Victory for Romance

By Pico Iyer

For 36 years, policemen have hidden in trees, concealed themselves in the trunks of cars or peered through bedroom curtains in order to enforce South Africa's laws against interracial lovemaking. They have been instructed to confiscate dirty bed linen as legal evidence and to force suspects to undergo an examination by police doctors. Over the years, the government's so-called sex laws have resulted in the prosecution of as many as 20,000 people. The stigma of conviction has also led to suicides and the murders of lovers and children.

Such tragedies should now be a thing of the past. South Africa's government last week proposed the repeal of the Mixed Marriages Act and Section 16 of the Immorality Act, laws that are generally interpreted as prohibiting marriage, cohabitation and sexual intercourse between whites and nonwhites. In reality, the move will not have a widespread effect: most authorities have long turned a blind eye to the country's few hundred mixed-race relationships. But the toppling of two of the pillars of apartheid seemed at the very least to prepare the way for further and more significant reforms. "The abolition of these laws is more symbolic than substantial," the Rev. Allan Hendrickse, leader of the country's colored (mixed race) parliamentary house told TIME. "But the ripple effect is the important thing. What we are seeing here is a courageous move by the government of Executive President P.W. Botha. Now we can only go forward."

The reforms, which were proposed by a multiracial parliamentary committee, and should be passed by Parliament before the end of June, were greeted by many blacks with great relief. When Hubert Rietbauer, a 39-year-old Austrian-born mining technician, and Lettie Baloyi, the black woman he has lived with for eight years, appeared in a Transvaal regional court last Friday charged with sex law violations, the hearing lasted no more than a minute. Suddenly, after an ordeal that had spanned five court appearances and three days in jail, the couple was acquitted. "This is a great day," Rietbauer said, "not just for us, but for all the other people who have been living in the twilight for so long. I think South Africa is at last growing up." In the colored township of Eersterus, outside Pretoria, Clive Fisher, a colored glazier, eagerly set about making plans for a formal church wedding to his English-born partner, Adele White, with whom he has been living for five years. "For the first time in my life," said the 34-year-old Fisher, "I feel proud to be a South African."

Even so, mixed couples in South Africa will enjoy a freedom that at best will be meager and mean. Their children could be racially classified as coloreds and sent to possibly inferior schools. And because of remaining race-restriction laws, a white and nonwhite married to each other still will technically be forbidden to live together in the same neighborhood, or travel on trains together, or go together to most beaches or movies. "I might share my bed with a white woman at night," said one colored M.P. last week, "but when we go out in the day, we have to go separate ways."

To allay widespread skepticism, the government last week made other gestures of goodwill. At Crossroads, a wretched, ten-year-old squatters' camp outside Cape Town, where 18 blacks were killed by the police last February, authorities helped the first of up to 12,000 black residents make a voluntary move to a nearby government housing area called Khayelitsha. There, in otherwise bleak surroundings, the new settlers are finding such unfamiliar amenities as outhouses, water taps and access to schools, clinics and a community center. They also are being given 18-month residency permits, which allow them to seek employment in the area. Such concessions, however, are being countered by continuing bloodshed in other townships and mounting evidence of police brutality. Last week at least 19 more blacks died violently in riots, and medical evidence presented to a government-appointed commission of inquiry showed that 17 of the 20 blacks killed by police last month near the town of Uitenhage were shot in the back.

In the face of the growing international outcry over South Africa's practices, the Botha government is also trying to present a conciliatory foreign policy. First, it announced last week that it would comply with a 14-month-old, U.S.-brokered agreement and withdraw its troops from Angola. Then, appearing before Parliament, Botha agreed to allow neighboring Namibia's internal political organizations, both black and white, to form an interim administration with a bill of rights and a constitutional court and council. Though not amounting to full self-government, that generous-seeming offer aroused fears in the West that South Africa, which has ruled Namibia in defiance of the United Nations for almost two decades, might be trying to dodge international demands for a pullout from the region by attempting to reach an under-the-table agreement with its Namibian opposition.

In Washington, the Reagan Administration appeared to be trapped in a delicate position, by turns applauding Botha's reformist promises and deploring the savage realities of apartheid. Mounting a counteroffensive against the 20 separate pieces of antiapartheid legislation introduced in Congress already this year, Secretary of State George Shultz tried to tiptoe along the high wire of the Administration's policy. Apartheid, he conceded, was "morally indefensible." At the same time, he warned, "we must not throw American matches on the emotional tinder of the region."

In South Africa, the dilemma has become even more vexing as the Botha government, swaying between reform and repression, finds itself accused by non- whites of being too intransigent and by Afrikaner hard-liners of being too soft. The provision of new housing and the imminent repeal of the sex laws were moves in the right direction. But both seemed small steps along a path that promises to be long and painful. --By Pico Iyer. Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town

With reporting by Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town