Challenging the Great White State

Desegregation began quietly, almost stealthily, in South Africa's white Roman Catholic schools. Last March, after the nation's bishops endorsed integration "in principle," a dozen blacks, Asians and mixed-race coloreds enrolled in three schools. The national government, which enforces strict racial segregation in all state schools, warned that the church's move was "contrary to established policy"--but it took no action to stop it. Nor did white parents protest.

In November, still quietly, the church admitted about 50 more non-white students. "At this stage, publicity is our worst enemy," said Archbishop Dennis Healey of Durban. And so it proved. When Catholic schools reopened after the Christmas holidays and reporters discovered that at least six had integrated, South Africa's provincial governments acted. Ignoring the national government's recent pledge to reduce racial discrimination, officials in Transvaal and Cape provinces threatened to close the offending schools and prosecute parents who did not transfer their children to segregated state schools.

Firm Stand. Catholic authorities stood firm. Said Father Dominic Scholten, head of the bishops' education department: "The time has come for the church to stand up and be counted." Added Sister Bernadette, headmistress of the newly integrated St. Catherine's Convent in the Transvaal town of Florida: "There are three criteria that we apply when enrolling pupils, and race is not one of them. We accept anyone who has correct moral character, intellectual ability and can pay our fees" (about $400 a year). A newspaper survey showed that 85% of those white parents who were questioned supported desegregation; so did most pupils.

Statistically South Africa's church schools play a small role, since they contain less than 5% of the nation's white students. The rest--some 900,000--attend free, compulsory state schools. For the nation's 3.7 million black students, however, attendance at separate state schools is optional, tuition costs $50 a year, and schooling is generally inadequate. The government spends ten times as much per pupil on whites as on blacks; the student-teacher ratio is 20 to 1 for whites, 60 to 1 for blacks. Better education was one of the major demands by young demonstrators in last year's riots in Soweto and other black townships, which left 500 dead. Blacks able to afford a good education have been pressing to enter the nation's 169 private schools. Says one colored girl in a newly integrated convent school in Johannesburg: "I feel I'm really getting an education now. Going to school before was just an exercise."

The Catholic Church, with 1.8 million followers (1.4 million of them black), has gained the support of other major churches in its campaign for integration. Leaders of the Anglican Church (1.7 million) met last week with government officials and announced plans to integrate their 20 schools. Said one: "It is our Christian duty." The Methodists (2.1 million) have also announced plans to integrate their four schools. The powerful Dutch Reformed Church (3.5 million) remains strongly segregationist, however. The churches that are moving toward integration have won voluble backing in the more liberal newspapers. "For God's sake leave them alone!" trumpeted one, Johannesburg's Sunday Express.

Officially the national government remained adamantly opposed to any integration. In a statement last week it warned: "Continual disregard for the law will have serious consequences. The government cannot allow organizations, whoever they are, to take the law into their own hands." Unofficially, however, the government is leery of taking on the Catholic Church, particularly after the international uproar about the Soweto rioting. Said one government official: "We're a pariah as it is. We don't want a quarrel with the Pope as well."

As they edged forward, Catholic officials could point to one odd justification for integration provided by the government itself. At the same time that Cape Administrator Louis Munnik was threatening to close two integrated Catholic schools last week, he ordered two white state schools to accept six black students. Reason: the six happened to be children of the consul from Transkei, one of the black "homelands" to which South Africa granted independence but which no other nation recognizes. Foreign black diplomats are exempted from South Africa's racial system, and in view of such exemptions, argues Father Scholten, "we should now allow our own black people in."

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