Whites oppose plan to build ‘Norweto’

Press, 25 August 1986, Page 10

Whites oppose plan to build ‘Norweto’

NZPA-Reuter Johannesburg Hundreds of angry white South Africans gathered in Hennops River, a picturesque village, yesterday, to protest against Government plans to build a huge black township in their area. The Government published plans earlier this month to build a township for 250,000 black people a few kilometres north of Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital.

The plans for the township, dubbed “Norweto” after the city’s sprawling south-west township of Soweto, has infuriated many local whites. They say it would spoil the countryside, depress

house prices, and boost crime. More than 1000 white people met in the village, some 20 km north of Johannesburg, to voice their objections, sign petitions, and raise money to fight the proposal. “We are not fighting this thing on a racial basis,” Phillip Rykaart, a local property developer, told the crowd.

“The proposed township here is in fact degrading the black people. We want to get away from the old Soweto, the old Alexandra, the slums that were there,” he said. Harassed officials of the Government’s Department of Constitutional Development and Planning were heckled when they tried to justify the township.

They said housing was needed for the rapidly swelling urban black population. Opponents of the plan said it was wrong to build a new black township when the fate of the Group Areas Act, a key apartheid act that segregates residential areas ac'cording to race, was in the balance. They did not suggest any alternative. The President, Mr Pieter Botha, said recently that the act might be made more flexible but the principle of separate areas would stay.

The Green Belt Action Group, a committee set up to fight the Government’s proposal, said it had gathered 5000 signatures on a protest petition.