Mixed sports meeting in S.A.

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32779, 2 December 1971, Page 15

Mixed sports meeting in S.A.

(A correspondent of “The Times," through N.Z.PA.)

CAPE TOWN, December 1. South Africa’s large-

scale essay in multiracial sports promises to have a considerable impact on inter-racial attitudes in the Republic. It may confront Mr Vorster’s Nationalist Government with fierce right-wing complaints.

Reactions to fast weekend’s multi-racial athletic meeting at Green Point Track, in Cape Town, suggest that the meeting will stir up even more controversy than Mr Vorster’s playing host to President Banda of Malawi during his State visit to the Republic. The success of the meeting has heartened South African liberals who argue that it has demonstrated that

wider contacts across the colour line can take place without fear of friction or unpleasantness. But Right-wing elements, such as Dr Albert Hertzog’s breakaway Herstigte Nationalist Party, are poised to exploit the fears about interracial mingling that are general among rank-and-file supporters of the Nationalist Nationalist members of Parliament report that the issue of mixed sport produces a much bigger mailbag of complaints and queries from their constituencies than Mr Vorster’s diplomatic contacts with black Africans. So Mr Vorster’s concessions promise to provide one of his biggest political headaches in

coming months. Opposition politicians, including such United Party spokesmen as Mr Japie Basson and the Progressive Party member, Mrs Helen Suzman, contend that the Success of the Green Point

meeting demonstrates the fatuousness of any kind of restriction on inter-racial sport. They are urging the Prime Minister to extend the concessions that applv to athletics. golf and tennis to team sports like cricket. Mr Vorster’s sports formula countenances mixed athletics, for example, on the basis that these are ’international” meetings with individual athletes representing the separate “nations” which comprise South African society in terms of the apartheid ideology. But the same formula rules out mixed cricket, as

things now stand. From now on Mr Vorster will be under sharply increased pressure on both flanks. The Opposition and some Verligte (“enlightened”) Nationalists will be press!ig for a further relaxation of restrictions, while Right-wing dissidents will argue that

things have already gone too far.

Among non - Nationalist South Africans, black and white, there is wide agreement that further experiments on the Green Point pattern can do much to relax interracial attitudes in the republic. Black athletes, on the whole, are delighted, but they point but that the meeting still falls far short of the requirements set by those who are fighting for complete noriraciahsm on the sports scene. At the Green Point meeting, only about 10 of 200 or more competitors were nohwhites, including athletes from black Africa, and the black South Africans among them were required to hold temporary pennits. One black sportsman has expressed resentment that a sportsman bom and bred in South Africa should require a permit to Compete. There have also been some comments among black sportsmen that the meeting was

"just a piece of window dressing.” Mr Hassan Howa, a leading non-white cricket administrator, had this to say: “This was intended to be multi-racial, in other words, different,. separate nations competing against each other, and as such, within the framework of apartheid. But it did not quite work out that way: “The athletes themselves, their, whole bearing, their joining hands at' the end—all these things indicated that it was really a non-racial affair, and the crowd took it as such,” There is now a measure of guarded optimism among sports administrators that the Green Point meeting could be the turning-point in South Africa’s battle to gain readmission to Olympic competition. But much will depend on the strength of the RightWing reaction and Mr vorster’s ability to handle it