Design across South African colour line

Press, 26 February 1981, Page 10

Design across South African colour line

‘ By

KEN COATES

l,' To'' be born black in South-Africa is bitter: to add a dash of white and be ctffee-coloured is to stir ■up this system to boiling point. So Writes Fleet Street’s “First Lady,” Jean Fook for the conservative “Daily Express,” from Cape /Town, where she is. visiting. . ‘‘

“Apartheid,” she says, “does not even allow you to step out of line. Cross it, and heaven' itself won’t help you.” She says people there are not supposed to “dice with sex, or mix their feelings'. You can be as blapk as sin, or white as chastity, but dare not have red blood."

; In Cape Town, the often highly educated and wellbred Cape Coloureds still have no vote, no voice, and no more hope of social standing in the community than the blacks.

■ “At best,” she says, “they are treated like fancy cross-breeds: at worst, like mongrels, who daren’t bite back.” Jean Rook gives a pointed description of Errol ", Arendz, South Africa’s leading fashion designer, and his sister, Gloria, a model and successful business partner, to illustrate her point. '■ Though some white women consider the business a crime, they still rush to pay big prices for an Arendz creation.

‘‘Arendz, at 27, is the colour of Nescafe Gold Blend,” writes Rbok. “The glorious Gloria is the cream you could add to it. “The white women who lap up their fashion outfits still find the couple, personally hard and bitter to swallow.”

She quote Arendz as saying that their very first white client nearly passed out when she asked for the boss, and got him.

“The blacks think we don’t know what they go through; We know it all right, though, of course,

it’s - ten times worse for them. When I’m fitting a white woman for a dress, I can still notice the dis- * gust on her face, which she tries not to show. Rook says it is black irony that the millionaire Arendz bo.uple would be invited to the most dazzling ’ white European or American party, just to add- their colour and dash to it. ■< , . She.quotes Errol Arendz as recalling that he got into art'school in Johannesburg because his family could afford to pay, and he was taken as a private pupil; Gloria Arendz s boyfriend is white, but she only looks “almost white.” If she were caught in bed with a white man, she could be jailed. If she tried to marry him. then she certainly woujd be iniprisoned. “To marry a white. I’d have to leave South Africa and 'Errol and all that we’ve built up together. Hell, South Africa is my country.” In six years time she will be 30j but she does not hold out any hope that the system will have changed bv then. She says apartheid is slowly crumbling — mixed restaurants, hotels, bathing, “the little things.” The underlying system, she adds, will take , years and years longer to change.