The Sporting Life

South Africa is finding itself hard put these days to keep its sporting citizens and their money at home. Apartheid laws forbid both miscegenation and public socializing between the races within the republic. Every kind of gambling except horse racing is banned. Even Playboy magazine is prohibited from sale or distribution under the Obscene Publications Act. The natural result of such strictures is that more and more South Africans are beating a path to three adjoining black states for fun and games.

First, the Royal Swazi Casino opened six years ago in the Kingdom of Swaziland's picturesque Ezulwini Valley. It proved so successful that Holiday Inns last year followed up with another hotel and casino in Lesotho, a tiny mountain kingdom completely surrounded by South Africa. Now the chain has opened a third casino at Gaborone, the dust-bowl capital of Botswana, which is located only 200 miles from Johannesburg.

The money from the casino-hotels (which amounts to $5,000,000 a year in Swaziland alone) has proved a boon to the black states and their tiny national budgets. The only trouble is that some of the visitors have gone about their interracial socializing too ardently, and prostitution has become a problem. Swaziland's black administrators are also offended by the fact that some white South Africans have set up black mistresses in Swaziland and visit them frequently. The government is now considering a law that would "curb immoral sex" between local girls and visiting white South Africans. Such a law, presumably, would go beyond the usual prostitution laws. It would be difficult to draw up, though, without prohibiting interracial sex, much as South Africa's own strict morality laws do.

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