S. Africa to End Racial Ban on Sex : Will Repeal Laws Forbidding Blacks To Marry Whites

After years of controversy and heartache, the South African government said Monday that it will repeal laws prohibiting interracial marriage and sexual relations and thus remove one of the foundation stones of apartheid, the country’s system of racial separation.

F.W. de Klerk, the minister of home affairs, told Parliament in a long-awaited announcement here that the government has endorsed the proposal of a special legislative committee that found the laws discriminatory and urged their repeal as part of South Africa’s efforts at gradual reform in race relations.

“Love does not limit itself,” said Piet J. Badenhorst, deputy minister for constitutional development and planning, who chaired the special committee, “and these laws have imposed a restriction on love.”

No Basis in Religion

The 22-member committee, which basically endorsed the findings of an earlier study group, said there is no basis in religion or Scripture for the ban on interracial marriage, which was enacted at the insistence of the politically powerful Dutch Reformed Church in 1949. The panel recognized that the legislation has become “the most contentious” on South Africa’s statute books, De Klerk told Parliament.

But the move, as difficult as it will be for the ruling National Party, was denounced by the government’s critics as “window-dressing for apartheid” and “a token gesture.”

While the laws’ repeal will end “the unnecessary personal humiliation for those couples who disregard racial barriers,” Patrick Lekota of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups, said in Johannesburg that “freedom of sexual association is not a basic issue . . . .

Right to Work, Vote

“What is crucial and must be repealed are those laws that deny the majority of South Africans political, residential, labor and citizenship rights,” Lekota added.

“Blacks want the right to work where they can find work and to live with their families near their places of employment. They want the right to vote for one central government and to participate in the drawing up of laws that govern their lives.”

Nevertheless, the sex laws’ repeal, expected within a few weeks by the National Party-dominated Parliament, will be a highly symbolic retreat from apartheid--as right-wing white politicians noted Monday in their denunciations of the draft legislation.

“It is pathetic to listen to the once-mighty National Party dismantling apartheid,” Donald van der Merwe of the Conservative Party told Parliament. He called the move “an irresponsible step that endangers our national identity and undermines still further the policy of separate (racial) development.”

Liberal proponents of the reform hope that it will bring changes in apartheid’s other basic laws, including those regulating racial classification. These specify where people of different races may live, work, eat and go to school, and they segregate South African society into dozens of groups and subgroups based on racial and ethnic origin.

“There is still much that has to be changed, but all change has to start somewhere,” said the Rev. Allan Hendrickse, chief minister of Parliament’s Colored (mixed-race) House of Representatives. “I believe there is now no turning back or slowing down on the changes that are coming.”

For Hendrickse’s Labor Party and other Colored and Asian parties that joined whites in the new tricameral Parliament despite widespread community opposition, the laws’ repeal will be one of their first political payoffs.

For whites promoting gradual reform from within, including liberals in the ruling National Party and the opposition Progressive Federal Party, the move will be “a small but significant step on the long and difficult road to reach racial normality,” as Tiaan van der Merwe of the Progressive Federal Party put it.

But for thousands of interracial couples, whose marriages have often been blessed by their churches but rarely recognized by the government, the repeal of the 36-year ban on marriages between whites and nonwhites will mean their emergence from a twilight zone that often forced them to act as strangers in public. (Marriages between Coloreds, Asians and blacks were not prohibited, only those between whites and nonwhites.)

‘Gray Areas’ of Cities

While many mixed couples managed to live together with some difficulty in “gray areas” of Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and other major cities, South Africa’s race laws generally prevented them from dining out together, staying at a hotel together or traveling together on a train. Their children’s births could not be registered, and the children could not attend public schools.

Brothers and sisters might be classified later as members of different races, largely based on looks, and families were often torn apart. Suicides have long been frequent among interracial couples who were barred from marrying under the 1949 law and were unable to carry this emotional burden.

Over the last five years, 918 individuals have been prosecuted under the two laws, often on the complaints of their neighbors, with police peering into bedroom windows and conducting midnight raids to obtain evidence of sexual relations.

Gerrit Viljoen, the minister for cooperation and development, said Monday that the reform is intended to “dismantle a negative aspect of apartheid.” In dealing with race relations, “the government is moving away from a dogmatic approach to a more flexible one,” Viljoen said.

But the special committee made no recommendations on all the related questions--where an interracial couple will live, whether segregated public facilities will be open to them, how their children will be classified--and left those issues to the government to handle administratively within current legislation.

“The continued ordering of our communities at social, educational and constitutional (political) levels will not be affected by the repeal,” De Klerk, the minister of home affairs, assured the white House of Assembly, noting that the government is committed to “protect group identities” and will proceed cautiously with further reforms.

This led the right-wing Herstigte Nasionale party’s Louis Stofberg to predict, “The government has let loose a tiger that it won’t be able to control.”