The other Cape Town

...At one such house we talked with a colored woman who'd just been released after a six-week detention growing out of the school boycott...

...They-we-don't simply want to exchange black ways for white ways...

...Docile and orderly, he has willingly played the role assigned him under apartheid...

...That placid picture was severely shaken last spring, when coloreds in the Cape and beyond staged a long series of protest demonstrations...

...But for the last few decades, and increasingly today, there have been two Cape Towns-more precisely, two sections of the Cape Peninsula, the spur of land that briefly separates Atlantic and Indian oceans at the bottom of the African continent...

...Some years ago, the authorities decided that it should be all-white and that its non-white servants and other workers should commute to and from the flats on the other side of the city...

...Nor does it significantly mitigate the gravity of the coloreds' social and political predicament...

...After the stolid Dutch came the French and the British and, as transients, seafarers and travelers of many other nations...

...At the party's annual conference last year, delegates sported tee shirts honoring Steve Biko, the martyred "black consciousness" leader, and shouted the black power slogan, Amanda Awethlu...

...Nat spokesmen periodically proclaim the "interdependence" of whites and coloreds, and Botha himself has predicted that coloreds will eventually be "assimilated" into the white community...

...They are pocked by wretchedly squalid housing "camps," to which are consigned the most powerless of the Cape's non-whites...

...White Capetonians have long taken their coloreds for granted-have patronized them, protected them (from the competition of black labor), and discriminated against them...

...So the white elite, on its nights out, winds up rubbing shoulders with the non-white working class, and social tensions have risen noticeably...

...That's when Dallas shows on TV here, and nobody goes out then...

...inadequate public services and facilities...

...They remained in their slums, and their education was still backward . . . [they] were exploited in every election...

...Rather, they are descendants of seventeenth-century unions between Dutch and indigenous Hottentots, with the blood of assorted Bushmen, Indians, and Asians mixed in...

...Although District Six was a ghetto, it was a ghetto of the coloreds' choosing, and parts of it had charm: cobbled streets, trellised verandas, sturdy and attractive turn-of-the-century houses that afforded a view of city and bay...

...Botha has been playing sweet overtures to colored political leaders...

...Behind the mountains that frame the picturesque city lie the Cape flats-vast, dusty, monotonous, and home to several hundred thousand of the native South Africans classified as "colored...

...Instead of a real vote, Botha would grant coloreds the right to elect their own local councils and, through a power-sharing arrangement under white control, their own parliament...

...What did they gain when they were on the rolls?'' the prime minister demanded not long ago...

...About one-third of South Africa's two-and-one-half million coloreds live in the southern reaches of the Cape province, in a swath that stretches roughly from Port Elizabeth on the east to Cape Town on the West...

...Founded in 1652 as a way station of the Dutch East India Company, Cape Town is the oldest European settlement in Africa...

...they had to live in one room of the house for the last month...

...While the coloreds were regarded as a lesser breed, they received decent treatment and lived and worked among the white Capetonians...

...Although blacks joined the protests in substantial numbers, this was an effort inspired, and largely organized and manned, by colored people, particularly by teenagers on the flats above Cape Town...

...Now a handful of local activists are protesting the government takeover of District Six, largest of the city's remaining colored areas...

...The whites who took over my cousin's family's place, started building an addition on it while the family was still there...

...scores of others were injured, and an unspecified but large number were "detained"-jailed on vague charges, for indefinite terms-under the regime's draconian laws against political transgression...

...It has lived on seaborne commerce and has thus attracted a sampling of the world's races and colors-in contrast to South Africa's interior cities, whose inhabitants are predominantly European or black African...

...It has damaged the social fabric of this city more than any other apartheid measure," says Colin Eglin, the spokesman on colored affairs for the moderate Progressive Federal Party (PFP...

...Here, they have their own style and pace of life...

...I've got a list of phone calls to make to suppliers this morning-reminding them that I have orders to place...

...for example, Malawian immigrants who have no right to government-assisted housing...

...But most realized how serious these youngsters were and gave them massive support...

...The whites do feel guilty," A.W...

...Coloreds, as well as Indians, Malays, and other non-whites, developed their own residential areas within the city...

...While District Six illustrates the inhumanity of Cape Town's housing policies, the suburb of Sea Point illustrates their inanity...

...Apparently none the worse for her experience, the woman spoke enthusiastically of the ways in which the boycott had politicized the flats' young people: "In those weeks away from school, they organized 'awareness' programs, held political discussions in their own homes, and convinced us parents to support them...

...Although the flats are predominantly colored, they also contain scattered townships for blacks, Indians, and Asians...

...In proclamations by activists, the term "colored" scarcely still exists...

...The immediate goal: a non-racial, unitary school system to replace the one that spends about ten and three times as much on white pupils as on blacks and coloreds, respectively...

...To that end also, Indians and Asians would be given similar privileges...

...and the social worker's own apartment, upper-middle-class by Cape Flats standards, yet cramped and cheerless and lacking both hot water and a door to the tiny yard...

...Die bruin Afrikaners (the brown Afrikaners), whites have called them fondly...

...They think it will just blow away...

...There and elsewhere in Cape Town, the zeal of the Group Areas removers has been damped only by the fact that some 65,000 colored and Indian families await new housing...

...We want a society in which everybody has a fair share...

...THE END of all that took shape in 1948, when the National party, new to power and intent on keeping it, instituted formal apartheid...

...Unlike blacks, coloreds can own property, and they are subject neither to being stuck away in racial "homelands" nor to carrying police state-style identification passes...

...The school boycott was organized by a student Committee of 81, named for the 81 schools represented...

...Even the ones who do commute hang around there after work...

...That was thirteen years ago...

...If they enfranchised the coloreds, the National party would lose about seven seats to the PFP...

...They're lazy and have no self-respect," the restaurant owner said...

...The act brings home to colored people every day their lack of political influence...

...We're for putting the best people in the jobs...

...As we talked and rode, sight piled on depressing sight: Valhalla Park, its units like miniature barracks but without electricity and in some cases without water, its children playing around a central spigot in a bare dirt courtyard...

...Cape Town is their center as well as their maternal homeland...

...As for job preference, he says empathically,"We don't want that...

...South African authorities replied with their customary alacrity and only slightly less than their usual forcefulness...

...Under apartheid the coloreds have been neither white nor black...

...and an absence of job opportunities that forces the residents to commute to the city for work...

...most of their houses have been bulldozed to make way for such whites-only amenities as a technical college and upper-middle-class housing...

...it has been subsumed under "black.'' The Labor party, strongest by far of the colored political organizations, has been openly contemptuous of most attempts to distinguish between the two groups...

...This scheme, denounced by virtually every credible colored leader, is widely regarded as a transparent effort to isolate the lone threat to perpetual white control-the majority blacks...

...the "park" for Bishop Lavis township-a large plot of sand and dirt...

...Curry made a claim that my other colored contacts echoed: The separation of coloreds from blacks is "artificial," a product of apartheid rather than of innate differences between the two groups...

...But we knew right at the outset the parents were with the kids...

...To an American, it is San Francisco plus: a natural setting of sandy beaches and rugged mountains and plateaus...

...Black leaders are in no hurry to make a firm political alliance with any group so small that it may prove irrelevant in the South African showdown...

...Yet the coloreds are rising on tiptoes for a political kiss that may not be delivered...

...Johannesburg is totally business-oriented," says a local hotel manager, "and Durban is a holiday place...

...We don't want, as they seem to in the States, to get the white man's big house...

...Like Soweto, the Cape Flats contain clusters of middle-class housing, complete with lawns and wall-to-wall carpeting...

...a black area with buildings uniformly gray and grimy...

...For the "Cape coloreds," as they were frequently called, apartheid brought two severe jolts...

...Part of "the problem" seems to be that Cape Town employers have made coloreds the local niggers...

...Indeed, Group Areas has turned a city that was more than half colored into one where only a few pockets of colored people reside...

...But the halls were packed...

...The colored residents were eventually scattered across the distant and inhospitable flats...

...While somewhat different in appearance from Soweto, the huge black township outside Johannesburg, the flats do duplicate a number of Soweto's conditions and problems: overcrowded houses and flats...

...Botha's assimilation does not include a return to the common voters' rolls...

...The manager, who left Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe, shakes his head over the Capetonians' attitude toward the colored situation: "They don't understand the problem...

...The blacks, as David Curry himself says,"resent us-I would too if I were one of them.'' And the whites, whatever their guilt feelings, seem determined either to ignore coloreds or to manipulate them for the purpose of shoring up defenses against a black onslaught...

...In the South African context, theirs is a laid-back city...

...I drove around the flats with a young colored social worker who lives there with her family...

...They are not, as foreigners commonly assume, products of miscegenation between whites and black Africans...

...Both the hotel manager and a young restaurant owner with whom I spoke denigrated their colored help...

...a rich, cosmopolitan history that is still reflected in the leisurely pace and the variety of passing faces...

...The second jolt was the passage of the Group Areas Act, which authorized the uprooting of non-whites from any area the government wants to use for other purposes...

...It was clear, however, that the boycott grew out of broad feelings of colored impotence and frustration, and that they were accompanied by a strong anti-capitalist strain...

...And the city itself developed a reputation for tolerance rarely found in the rest of South Africa...

...ROGER M. WILLIAMS is a free lance writer...

...In other ways, the flats are the worse of the two locations...

...White Cape Town has not worried over such nonsense...

...Not that much remains to save...

...White Cape Town, meanwhile, still prefers ignorance to manipulation...

...The first two meetings were called for Tuesday nights...

...The demonstrations centered on rundown and generally inadequate schools, but in Cape Town they grew into a bus boycott that crippled the city for two days...

...now, because the Nats wanted to dilute the support of their United party opponents, coloreds were disenfranchised, and have remained so...

...The success of the bus boycott was hard evidence of a new parental attitude...

...David Curry, national chairman of the Labor party, points out that the right to own property makes coloreds all the more vulnerable under the Group Areas Act...

...Then groups of white people-council officials-came through the houses looking to see how clean we were and whether they'd even want the places...

...While that claim makes some sense, it does not wholly explain the uncertain state of black-colored affairs...

...She and her family used to live in a Cape Town colored neighborhood, "a village, almost, where everyone knew everyone else and had a house with a little ground...

...Thus the residents enjoy none of the natural cohesion that binds-and will someday galvanize-the Sowetans...

...Most of us," editor Heard remarks, "don't want to be too well informed...

...The result, says Colin Eglin, whose parliamentary district includes Sea Point, is that the town is "blacker than ever: twenty thousand blacks and coloreds are living there illegally, to avoid making that daily trip...

...Four-fifths of the ten thousand families have been forced out...

...Throw them a political bone, while eliminating apartheid's petty irritations, the regime seems to feel, and those South Africans who are neither black or nor white will cast their lot with the whites...

...Colored people occupy a special, and specially frustrating, patch of the racial/political crazy quilt that is South Africa...

...In 1976, when students on the flats rallied in behalf of the Soweto demonstrators, colored parents were worried and generally unsympathetic...

...Colored leaders take pains to minimize these distinctions...

...So the beautiful city drifts serenely onward, while man-made thunder rumbles behind the mountains.der rumbles behind the mountains...

...These kids," the social worker told me earnestly, "have been reading and learning...

...While the right to vote languished as an issue (it is only now being revived), the Group Areas Act has for three decades been a major aggravation to both coloreds and blacks...

...One was their removal from the common voters' roll...

...But the present trend among coloreds, at both the leadership and grass-roots levels, indicates that they consider themselves more black than white...

...In the Cape province, black resentment has been heightened by job preference statutes that favor coloreds at their expense...

...Male coloreds had been able to vote-for white parliamentary candidates...

...Socially and politically, they languish in a no-man's land between the two groups that will determine the country's future...

...Perhaps they will eventually...

...Everyone with whom I talked agreed that parental support was a highly significant development...

...Although the image is somewhat misleading-"coloreds" come in all shades between black and white-the colored person has acceded to the designation...

...I'll take a black every time...

...In addition, blacks have long regarded coloreds with a suspicion verging on hostility, that is, as crypto-Afrikaners who suffer far fewer restrictions under apartheid...

...At least thirty-three men, women, and children were killed in scuffles with police...

...This time, our hostess said, "a lot of parents are still worried-about the dangers involved, about the involvement of the local skollie [roughneck] crowd...

...Nevertheless, the National regime of P.W...

...Sea Point is a fashionable town on the coast...

...a handsome assortment of architectural styles...

...In the process, it has strewn the Cape Flats with ersatz "townships" and helped greatly to create the festering condition that erupted in the boycotts...

...At least he knows who he is-a Xhosa or a Causa or whatever-and he has some pride.'' That hardly sounds like a reflection of the guilt that South African whites are said to feel toward coloreds, as bruin Afrikaners who share their language and blood...

...When I was in Cape Town, committee leaders were refusing to talk to the press...

...Heard, editor of the Cape Times, assured me,"but they don't know what to do about it...