Port Elizabeth Journal; Apartheid Could Part a Community That Works
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN, Special to the New York Times
Published: November 30, 1988
PORT ELIZABETH, South Africa, Nov. 25— The ramshackle houses built of corrugated metal and weathered scrap wood hardly make Kleinskool look like a model community. Its 1,500 families get by without electricity and indoor plumbing, using backyard privies and fetching their water from public spigots that leave mud puddles in the coarsely tufted earth.
But Kleinskool, a community wedged between black and mixed-race neighborhoods on the northern outskirts of Port Elizabeth, has shown that harmony can exist in South Africa across the racial lines drawn by the state.
Its black residents and those of mixed race have lived side by side for years, despite the white Government's insistence that they belong in separate racial groups. Hundreds have intermarried and raised children who play together without any notion of where they fit in the official scheme of apartheid.
Now the Government has determined that integration in Kleinskool, though decades old, is an idea whose time has not yet come. On Sept, 2, a proclamation in the Government Gazette declared Kleinskool a neighborhood only for those of mixed race, called colored in the lexicon of race classification. The ruling has made the community's blacks illegals in the homes where many were born and raised. Fears for the Future
Though the decision has yet to be enforced, the threat that blacks will be forcibly removed has raised fears of families being uprooted, of relatives and friends separated, of men moved away from hard-won jobs, of children dropped into unfamiliar schools that teach in a language they do not fully comprehend.
Kleinskool - the name means ''little school'' in the Afrikaans language widely spoken in the community -had integrated long before the National Party formally introduced apartheid in 1948. ''In the old days, whites used to live in the big houses along the road, and the others lived around them,'' said John Bele, a local lay preacher of the Orthodox Order of Ethiopia Church who settled in Kleinskool nearly a dozen years ago.
In 1935, a colonial health survey reported that the population of Kleinskool consisted of 410 ''natives,'' as blacks were then called, 390 of mixed race, 77 ''Europeans,'' or whites, and 7 Asians. More blacks owned property in Kleinskool than the others, and when the whites and Asians moved out, residents say, it was for economic rather than racial reasons. Two Gangs in Turf Wars
Kleinskool had a raucous reputation. In the 1970's, two gangs calling themselves the Mafia and the Mongrels fought turf wars in the dirt alleys. But residents scoff at the Government's contention that the violence was racial, noting that the gangs were racially integrated.
Three years ago, when rebellion against the Government spread through the nonwhite suburbs of Port Elizabeth, Mr. Bele said, Kleinskool's inhabitants chased out those thugs whom the police had not killed or jailed, and gang warfare subsided.
When the Government began forcibly removing black South Africans from their homes to create a tidier racial checkerboard, it seemed to overlook Kleinskool.
The Group Areas Act, the legal basis for residential segregation, caught up with Kleinskool's residents only this year, just as the act was being amended to permit integrated ''open areas'' elsewhere. The Department of Constitutional Planning and Development, whose responsibilities include the relocation of blacks, ignored an appeal from lawyers representating the community to defer its decision until the amendment was approved.
Instead, the department ruled that its black residents belonged in a more distant black township at Motherwell. Those of mixed race married to blacks would have to move there, too, because South African law classifies a family according to the spouse with the darker skin pigmentation.
The department has its own targets to meet. Its minister, Chris Heunis, announced recently that some 250,000 nonwhite South Africans still had to be removed from areas where they were not authorized to live.
''I can't go at my age and start a new life,'' protested John Philip, a black former farm worker who guessed that he was well over 60 years old. ''All my neighbors don't want to move.'' Mr. Philip said some of his nine children supported the family by working as domestics for local mixed-race families. ''They can walk to work,'' he said. ''If we move to Motherwell, they would have to pay bus fare.''
Other black residents worry about the effect on their children, who have quietly attended nearby mixed-race schools that teach in Afrikaans. They cited the experience of black neighbors living across the creek who were removed to Motherwell three years ago after their patch was restricted to those of mixed race. One, Susanna Seekoei, secretly returned to Kleinskool and told friends that her children had lost a year in the new school because they did not speak the Xhosa language well enough to understand the teacher. Frictions Between Groups
Uncertainty about the future has settled on Kleinskool like the night fog rolling in from the nearby Indian Ocean. ''We don't know what the Government's next action will be,'' Mr. Bele said. ''People were asking, 'Should we fix up our houses for winter?' They didn't know what to do.''
Mixed signals from the Government have introduced frictions between black residents and those of mixed race. Its promise that low-cost housing and new utilities would be brought to Kleinskool after the blacks moved encouraged many mixed-race residents to keep silent. Then a department official, T. M. Smith, was quoted as having said the blacks did not really face removal. ''The area has been proclaimed colored for property ownership only,'' Mr. Smith explained.
Mr. Bele, the lay preacher, said, ''I don't believe God approves of the way that the Government is trying to divide the people.'' He said that whatever the white authorities decided he would stay because he was building a new church for his small congregation. .
''They must shoot me first because I am going nowhere,'' said Mr. Bele, who is now 70. ''If they want to shoot me, they can shoot.''
photos of John Bele; children at play in South Africa (NY/Christopher S. Wren)