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In Cape Town the largest gray area is Woodstock, a neatly tended neighborhood of stucco houses situated on the slopes of Table Mountain. In contrast to Hillbrow, which was formerly all white, Woodstock has always been home to a sizable colored population, most of whom speak the same Afrikaans language as local whites and belong to Dutch Reformed churches -- though not the same ones as local whites. The recent infusion of Asians and blacks into this existing mixture prompted the government to announce plans to rezone it as a "colored area," a step that would have forced white residents to move out. An interracial grass-roots campaign was organized to fight the proposed rezoning, and at least for the time being, has succeeded. Says an elated Peter Parkin, a city councilman and head of the Open Woodstock campaign: "The first nail is being driven into the coffin of residential segregation in South Africa."
Inevitably some white residents of neighborhoods in transition, especially those populated by working-class families, extend something less than a hearty welcome to those who cross the color line. A scribbled message on a shopping center wall in Yeoville, a blue-collar Johannesburg neighborhood, sums up the animosity: INTEGRATION STINKS. In Bertrams, another working-class neighborhood of Johannesburg, a white woman who lives on a street whose residents are mostly black, colored or Indian, voices a typical complaint. "If they lived one family to a flat, it wouldn't be so bad," she says. "But there are so many that now I can't sit outside."
What is surprising, however, is that more often than not the graying of South Africa has been accomplished peacefully, if not always amicably. A national poll of white South Africans conducted early this year found that 52% regarded gray areas as acceptable, while 46% thought they should not be permitted. Increasingly, white South Africans find that they have little choice but to face reality. "Hillbrow is already a multiracial area, and no one is going to change that," says Leon de Beer, who represents the community in Parliament. "You can't unscramble a scrambled egg."
The government has announced it will propose an amendment to the Group Areas Act that would permit some communities to open their residential areas to more than one race. Liberal critics of that plan claim it is unnecessarily cumbersome and call instead for consigning the entire act to the same scrap heap used for such now discarded remnants of apartheid as the ban on interracial marriage and the infamous pass laws, which required blacks to carry documents stipulating where they could live and work. The government insists that no such drastic move is called for, and promises that communities wanting to remain segregated will be allowed to do so. But John Kane-Berman, executive director of the South African Institute of Race Relations, strongly disagrees. "It is clear that the government is compelled by the right mix of pressure and action to shift its bottom line continuously," he says. "The next domino to fall is the Group Areas Act."