South Africa: A Partial Victory for Romance

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."