Sex & Color

Boy met girl in a government office in Pretoria. She was a clerk, he a local merchant who came in on official business. Soon they were going out to movies together; finally, they drove up to Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, and got married. But three weeks after the couple returned to South Africa and set up housekeeping in Durban, two detectives knocked at the door and took them off to the police station. Reason: Charlotte Bloem, 22, was white, and Syrub Singh, 28, was an Indian.

Upward Spiral. Their case involved two extraordinary apartheid measures: South Africa's Immorality Act, which forbids sexual relations between people of different colors, and a second law, which prohibits mixed marriages. As a deterrent, the Immorality Act has worked none too well over the years. In the past decade, about 4,000 mixed unmarried couples have been convicted. Victims need not be caught in the act; they can be jailed if discovered in suspicious circumstances. Last summer John Rudd, 34, a prominent Johannesburg businessman, was arrested in his home with Dottie Tiyo, a dark-skinned 21-year-old professional dancer; when the police came in, Rudd wore only a towel, and the girl had his bathrobe on. Each drew six months in prison.

Some of the most publicized cases have involved seemingly stanch supporters of apartheid, including one high government official. Many white policemen have been arrested for making love to non-white prisoners in their own scout cars.

Often the scandals involve girls from the so-called "colored" groups;--their light skins are a constant source of confusion to sailors and other foreigners in the Cape. When one seaman from Sweden was recently sentenced to eight strokes with a police cane for attempting sexual relations with a non-European, his Swedish captain protested angrily: "Cape Town is full of beautiful colored girls who look exactly like southern Europeans to anyone from Scandinavia!"

Married or Not? Since most cases are reported in the press, thousands of lives and careers have been wrecked. In Port Elizabeth last month, a white man drove his car off the pier and drowned after he learned that police would bring Immorality Act charges against him; in Klerksdorp, a father of four children asphyxiated himself rather than go to court for his affair with a black woman.

But Syrub Singh, the Indian, and his new white wife Charlotte, who had taken the Hindu faith, stood proudly in the dock last week in Durban's regional court. The prosecutor sought to prove that the Singhs' marriage did not exist since South Africa's Mixed Marriages Act rendered it automatically invalid. Thus, he argued, the "unmarried" couple, by living together, had violated the Immorality Act. The defense attorney retorted that the Singhs were indeed legally married since South Africa's legislation could hardly apply in Southern Rhodesia, where the wedding took place. As they awaited the court's decision, Syrub and Charlotte knelt in Durban's Hindu temple and prayed: "Please, may we never be parted."

*About 1,500,000 people of mixed blood who are relatively light-skinned products of white men's intercourse with native blacks over the years. The other racial groups in South Africa: 11 million blacks (also known as Bantu, Kaffirs, or simply natives), who enjoy even fewer privileges than the coloreds; 500,000 Asians; 3,000,000 whites. Of the latter, about 1,800,000 are of Boer (Dutch) stock and known as Afrikaners.

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