South Africa officially desegregated its public facilities three months ago. But you would never know it in Bethal, an all-white farm town 95 miles southeast of Johannesburg. The town hall and traffic departments still have separate entrances marked “Whites Only” and “Non-Whites.” And to discourage blacks from using Bethal’s only public library, the town council introduced a $200 annual membership fee for “non-residents.” Twice in recent months the council cut off water, electricity and sewage services to the nearby black township of eMzinoni, claiming that residents owed $500,000 in unpaid public-utility bills. An outbreak of dysentery followed. “It is a display of naked racism,” says Goolam Karim, a local physician of Indian ancestry. “The aim is to exacerbate racial tension and conflict.”
For all the bold talk out of Pretoria about a “new” South Africa, pockets of white resistance are scattered throughout the agricultural heartland of Transvaal province–and there is little the de Klerk government can do about it. When South Africa’s Parliament voted last June to repeal the Separate Amenities Act, it failed to give the central government the power to enforce the new order. As a result, several town councils controlled by the far-right Conservative Party (CP) are openly flouting the law–and some white extremists have turned to violence. Outside a newly desegregated park in the town of Louis Trichardt, right-wing thugs recently attacked a group of black Sunday-school children with whips, clubs and automobile fan belts. In Ermelo, 125 miles southeast of Johannesburg, a gang of whites savagely beat three young blacks in late October after one of them took a dip in the public swimming pool.
A typical high-veld town of tidy one-story stucco houses and thrusting church spires, Bethal elected Conservative Party candidates to all nine seats on the town council two years ago. CP officials have endorsed Bethal’s actions, as well as those of several other predominantly Afrikaner communities, arguing that council members are merely fulfilling campaign promises to keep public facilities segregated. But blacks say they feel increasingly unsafe on Bethal streets at night and complain of random assaults by young whites. Some Conservative Party officials warn that more violence is inevitable. “The majority of whites will not take it lying down,” warns Paul Fouche, a member of the Pretoria town council.
Neither will some blacks. A week after the attack on the black schoolchildren in Louis Trichardt, two of the 13 whites charged in the case barely escaped an angry mob of 70 revenge-seeking blacks. The incident also triggered a highly effective boycott of white- and Indian-owned businesses in the northern Transvaal town.
It may be the courts rather than the executive branch that eventually halt the far right’s rear-guard campaign against desegregation. In November, a judge ordered the conservative town council in the Johannesburg suburb of Springs to reopen two public swimming pools it had closed–supposedly on financial grounds–two months earlier. The judge concluded that the town had shut the pools to avoid integration. The Springs town council plans to appeal, but the ruling opens the way for other legal challenges to anti-integration measures. In the meantime, segregation will remain the order of the day in scattered communities, stubborn bedrocks defying the tide of political change in South Africa.
