Apartheid

The parliament of South Africa has dismantled the last pillar of apartheid law. The Population Registration Act of 1950 -- which required every South African to be registered as white, black, colored (mixed ancestry) or Asian -- is repealed. But nothing has replaced it. The change in law affects babies about to be born, who will not be registered. Everyone else already is. The rolls are not erased.Racial classification combined with segregation laws gave most of South Africa to its fortunate minority and denied most of it to its majority.

As someone who was involved in the divestment movement against apartheid in South Africa, I read with interest the Rev. James W. Dale's recent commentary ("Choosing to stay engaged," May 4). I was appreciative of the author's recognition that the Israeli occupation is oppressive. However, the case against divestment from companies profiting from the Israeli occupation was not made. In fact, his commentary reminded me of the arguments made against divestment of companies involved in South Africa.

A year ago, President F. W. de Klerk dropped a bombshell on opening the white parliament by announcing the legalization of outlawed organizations including the African National Congress. When he repeated the performance Friday, by announcing as his legislative program an end to the legal foundations of apartheid, the ANC was out in the street on a one-day national strike demanding an immediate share in political power for black people.Scrapping old laws of residential and land ownership segregation will not make one black person richer or happier or better housed the next day. The results of generations of those laws going back to 1913 will still be in place and will remain a major subject for future, multiracial South African politics.

Theodore Neal "Ted" Holmes, who founded the old Chicken George restaurant chain and built it into a regional fast-food business, died of diabetic complications Nov. 29 at Sanctuary at Holy Cross in Burtonsville. The Jessup resident was 72. Born in York, Pa., he was son of the Theodore G. Holmes, a Cadillac dealership worker, and Sarah Wilson Holmes. He was a 1957 graduate of William Penn Senior High School, where he played basketball and was later inducted into the school's hall of fame.

Welcome as South Africa's decision to scrap its apartheid land and housing laws may be, mere repeal of noxious laws does not compensate for years of dispossession. Millions of blacks were deprived of their homes and forcibly moved to segregated locations in the past four decades. Many were denied home ownership. There will have to be some system of reparation and redress before the country can really become a non-racial democracy.The situation in South Africa today can be compared, perhaps fancifully, with the demolition of the Berlin Wall.

A federal panel of three judges overturned Georgia's congressional districting scheme last month on the grounds that a district was an unconstitutional "racial gerrymander," drawn with the sole purpose of creating a black majority. Earlier, another federal panel ruled that three Texas districts drawn to facilitate the elections of minority candidates "bear the odious imprint of racial apartheid."Both panels were inspired by the Supreme Court's 1993 decision in a North Carolina case in which Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that a district whose residents have "little in common with one another but the color of their skin bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid."

WASHINGTON -- Because Jimmy Carter orchestrated peace between Egypt and Israel in 1979, many extol him as an honest broker. Others offer praise for his work as a human rights activist. Whether he can maintain his image after publishing his latest book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, is uncertain. The idea that Israel, the Middle East's lone democracy, practices apartheid is nonsense. South Africa practiced institutionalized discrimination against its citizens on the basis of skin color.

NEW YORK -- Once upon a time, in a country called South Africa, the color of your skin determined where you lived, what jobs you were allowed to have and whether you could vote. Decent countries around the world fought the evil of racial apartheid by turning South Africa into a pariah state. They barred it from global events such as the Olympics. Businesses and universities boycotted South Africa, damaging its economy and adding to the isolation of the white-minority government, which finally repealed apartheid laws in 1991.

On a radio show a black woman insists that few would care if the victims were black. By fax comes an update of an elaborate O.J. frame-up fantasy signed, ''An African-American.'' On the phone, a black professor recalls his visit to Seattle where two hotel employees told him, ''They're cutting us down one by one.''A Gallup Poll solidifies these amorphous racial feelings into numbers. Sixty percent of black Americans but only 15 percent of white Americans think O.J. is innocent. Sixty-eight percent of white Americans but 24 percent of black Americans think the charges against him are true.

I was 18. I had been at college only a week and there was this poster asking us not to buy South African oranges. It seemed so obvious and so compelling that I wrote immediately to my parish priest at home demanding that he preach on the topic that Sunday. I truly believed that if enough of us students did as I did, the walls of Jericho would soon come tumbling down.That was 34 years ago. I have since learned not only that it takes more than the marching feet of students to change South Africa, but that South Africa is only one of many terrible examples of man's bestiality to man. Yet to me, as to many of my generation, South Africa remains the special case that affected us more intimately and emotionally than Guatemala, Afghanistan, Iraq or Rwanda.

During the late 20th century, human rights campaigns led by Western progressives helped to liberate two nations on the tip of the African continent from brutal whites-only rule. In 1980, the apartheid regime of Rhodesia gave way to a black-led Zimbabwe. And in 1994, the first multiracial elections in South Africa delivered the presidency to a black man, the longtime anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela. In the years since, the two nations have traveled very different paths. South Africa has enjoyed stability, a free press, international investment, an independent judiciary and democratic elections - helped by the graceful exit of Mr. Mandela, who retired after one term.

PORT ELIZABETH, South Africa -- Neckties flapped in the breeze as the half-dozen or so gang members gathered at their regular spot outside a small power substation. Their formal attire was unusual. On this morning, they would bury one of their own, a sweet-faced 16-year-old named Adriaan who had been savagely murdered. Paulus Gaai, at 19 one of the more senior Street Kids, said the killer was from the rival Preston Show Boys and vowed payback. As he spoke, a gold tooth glittered; his mirrored sunglasses reflected rows of battered houses and young people like him with no jobs.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa --At first glance, Isabella Mosime's story could not possibly say all that much about the future of South Africa. After all, she is a black teenager who was raised by a white family, an anomaly in this race-obsessed country. Look more closely, though, and Bella exemplifies something potentially significant. Because she has a foot in both the black and white worlds, this loud and bubbly 19-year-old can move nimbly back and forth, smudging those lines in the process.

NEW YORK -- Once upon a time, in a country called South Africa, the color of your skin determined where you lived, what jobs you were allowed to have and whether you could vote. Decent countries around the world fought the evil of racial apartheid by turning South Africa into a pariah state. They barred it from global events such as the Olympics. Businesses and universities boycotted South Africa, damaging its economy and adding to the isolation of the white-minority government, which finally repealed apartheid laws in 1991.

PRETORIA, South Africa -- The vicious rumor at the Afrikaans Boys High School earlier this year went like this: Upon the death of Nelson Mandela, an underground army organized by the black-led ruling political party would rise up and kill whites across South Africa in belated revenge for decades of apartheid oppression. Among white students at this school that once educated the sons of apartheid-era presidents and prime minsters, the improbable scenario took on a name, Operation White Cleanup.

I saw a production of My Children! My Africa! at Studio Theatre in Washington the other night, and it broke my heart. In 1984, Athol Fugard wrote a play about racial tensions exploding at a high school in apartheid South Africa. His drama is a powerful lament about the shameful waste of bright, shining young lives. If you go My Children! My Africa! runs through Oct. 21 at the Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. N.W., Washington. 8 p.m. Wednesday-Friday; 2 p.m., 8 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m., 7 p.m. Sunday.

As a housing lawyer on leave from my public-interest practice in Johannesburg, I came to Baltimore last October, enthusiastic to learn how to ''undo'' racial segregation. I was anxious for lessons about integrated neighborhoods, the constitutional right to choose where to live and the role of government in ensuring equal opportunities and fair housing practices.My own Afrikaner ancestors, after all, had developed a national social system -- apartheid -- upon the foundation of racial residential segregation.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Desmond Tutu giggles often and cries easily. But that should not fool anyone. At 75, the retired Anglican archbishop who valiantly fought the evils of apartheid retains a feisty willingness to tweak those in power. Only now, South Africa is ruled by the black-led African National Congress, the same movement Tutu worked alongside during the long, bitter struggle to end oppressive white minority rule. "I'm so desperately anxious for our country to succeed, and it has the capacity, the potential," the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner said in an interview, explaining his blunt talk.