Shortly after African National Congress Leader Govan Mbeki was set free this month, a group of his supporters held a rally at Johannesburg's Khotso House, headquarters of a dozen antiapartheid groups. Only a year earlier, white occupants of an apartment house across the street had caused a minor riot at the same spot by tossing flowerpots and other missiles onto the crowd from their balconies. This time curious residents again peered from their balconies, but no one down below thought of ducking. Even though the apartment building is restricted by law to whites only, most of the onlookers were black.
With gathering speed, yet another of apartheid's pillars -- the mandatory residential separation of the races -- is crumbling. Especially in Johannesburg but also in other large cities, neighborhoods that were once entirely white are seeing a steady influx of ethnic Asians, "coloreds" (people of mixed race), and, most surprisingly, blacks. The migration to these so-called gray areas is taking place in violation of the Group Areas Act, which completed the process of assigning every square foot of South Africa to residential use by one of the four racial groups and, when passed in 1950, was hailed by Prime Minister Daniel F. Malan as the "essence of apartheid." Though the present government of State President P.W. Botha insists that the law remain on the books, authorities do virtually nothing to enforce it.
The unraveling of the Group Areas Act began in 1982, when the Transvaal supreme court ruled that an Indian found to be in violation of the law could not be evicted from her home unless authorities could prove the "availability of alternative accommodation." That was -- and still is -- an impossible task. Severe overcrowding plagues most nonwhite areas, which contain 73% of the country's total population but cover only 13% of its land. In the black township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, for example, the typical four-room "shoe box" home is occupied by an average of 16 people.
As increasing numbers of whites moved to the suburbs, urban areas were saddled with a glut of housing that, by law, could be sold or rented only to other whites. As recently as last year, this white flight had left at least one apartment out of four in central Johannesburg unoccupied, and surplus housing nationwide reached a total of 37,000 units. Market forces gradually overcame legal ones, and whites began renting to nonwhites, often with the assistance of real estate agents who specialize in "C.I.A. listings," a coy abbreviation for "colored, Indian and African." In Johannesburg the largest concentrations of nonwhites have settled in the downtown business area and a midtown neighborhood called Hillbrow, which now has a 40% black population of about 35,000. "What is happening in Johannesburg is not an issue of political defiance but a case of necessity," says Tony Leon, a city councilor who represents a gray section of Hillbrow. "These people have nowhere else to go."