Coloured M.P. will fight them on the beaches

Press, 5 January 1987, Page 8

Coloured M.P. will fight them on the beaches

NZPA-AP Johannesburg Members of a Rightwing white political party say they will patrol the beaches today and call the police if they catch a “coloured” member of Parliament swimming in a white area. Allan Hendrickse, a mixed-race member of the national Cabinet and head of the “coloured” chamber of Parliament, said yesterday he would take a swim against apartheid on the beaches. “We will swim where we want to swim,” he told a Labour Party congress in Port Elizabeth. Mr Hendrickse’s son, Peter, also a member of Parliament, recently made a protest swim at the whites-only Kings Beach in Cape province. In Durban yesterday, the Right-wing pro-apart-heid Herstigte Nasionale Party, which holds one seat in the 178-seat white chamber of Parliament, issued the warning to Mr Hendrickse. Attie Loock, regional organiser of the party in the eastern Cape, was quoted by the South African Press Association (S.A.P.A.) as saying that 25 party members would patrol five, white beaches and call the police if they saw anyone of another race using them. Mr Hendrickse has not said at which beach he would swim. Mr Loock was quoted as saying that white people had awnplaiaed to him that lfick and “cokmrad”

people were using their beaches. But S.A.P.A. quoted the Durban beach manager, Johan Crafford, as saying that the only complaints had come from a "handful of men who scan the beach with binoculars.” S.A.P.A. quoted President Pieter Botha yesterday as saying that the principle of separate residential areas would never be surrendered. In his speech, yesterday Mr Hendrickse said his party might have to leave Parliament if the Group Areas Act, which provides for separate housing areas, was not scrapped. Mr Hendrickse’s party holds 77 of the 80 elected seats in the House of Representatives. Mr Botha’s National Party holds 127 of the 178 seats in the white House of Assembly. There is also a House of Parliament for Asians, but none for blacks. Last week, two mixedrace children were stopped by the police as they walked by a white Port Elizabeth beach. Their lawyer said they were being investigated for a possible violation of the Separate Amenities Act, which allocates beaches, camping grounds, buses and other public facilities according to race. On Friday, 18 blacks who swam at white Humewood Beach, near Port Elizabeth, were arrested under the; act, S.A.P.A. reported. ®