Oil company opens apartheid wound

Press, 5 January 1987, Page 10

Oil company opens apartheid wound

NZPA-AP Cape Town On a prime location near the centre of Cape Town is a wasteland of overgrown fields dotted with six churches and mosques — a conspicuous scar left by apartheid.

Now British Petroleum has reopened the wound by offering to rebuild the razed District Six area into South Africa’s first legally integrated neighbourhood.

In more than a century, District Six evolved into a dilapidated but vibrant multiracial, lOOha community. In 1966 the South African Government declared it a whites-only area, and within 15 years demolished virtually every non-church building and moved more than 40,000 Coloureds to characterless, far-away suburbs. In mid-November, when British Petroleum offered to organise a multi-million-dollar redevelopment if the area were opened to all races, not only the Government but also its opponents were unenthusiastic. “Until such time as all South Africans can live where they want, let District Six be a reminder of the pain that an ethnically based land policy can cause. Let it be an open wound,” said the Rev. Alan Brews, a Methodist minister whose church on the edge of the district lost much of its congregation to the evictions.

Even Cape Town’s City Council, dominated by members of the Liberal Progressive Federal

Party, has given the offer a lukewarm response, in part, council members say, because the oil company did not consult it in advance.

Clive Keegan, chairman of the council’s planning committee, described the offer as an exercise in public relations, and said it was unlikely that the National Party Government would relax its Group Areas Act — the legislation that segregates neighbourhoods. “District Six has always been a terribly emotional place,” said Mr Keegan. “To allow a foreign oil company to step in and redevelop it as a multiracial neighbourhood would be more than the Government’s pride could bear.” - ..r-’ 5

Mr Keegan said the proposal, if implemented, might serve as a positive example for the rest of

the republic. The City Council would prefer/ however, that the Group Areas Act be scrapped entirely.

Similar views were expressed by Richard Rive, an English professor whose Coloured family left its District Six home in 1965.

“There is no sense trying to right a wrong hete symbolically when the wrong is still perpetrated elsewhere,” he said. “I’m not terribly excited about District Six becoming non-racial.”

British Petroleum apparently realising the sensitivity of its offer, has declined public comment on the matter since its announcement. -- The Government has made no detailed response, other than noting that the law prohibits

multi-racial neighbourhoods. ?

The proposal has been welcomed by , some moderates, such as the Rev. Allan Hendrickse, leader, of Parliament’s Coloured chamber. He said the President, Mr Pieter Botha, had a golden opportunity to demonstrate his sincerity about reform. It was Mr Botha, when Community Development Minister, who issued the whitesonly : proclamation in 1966.

Mr Brews, a white whose congregation is mainly Coloured, called the proposal a “ghastly capitalist ! public relations exercise.’’ “People don’t want District Six ;to become an open ■ area so Botha and his cohorts can go overseas and say, ‘see what we’ve done’,” Mr Brews said.