Apartheid

The influential Dutch Reformed Church, whose religious teachings helped form the ideological basis of apartheid, declared Wednesday that South Africa's system of racial separation and minority white rule is morally wrong and has done the country and its people grievous harm.

Helen Suzman, the country's most durable anti-apartheid politician, announced today that she will retire in September after 36 years in Parliament. Suzman, 71, is the longest-serving member of Parliament, having represented the same Johannesburg constituency since 1953. From 1961 through 1974, she was the only legislator representing the anti-apartheid opposition and often cast the sole vote against discriminatory or repressive laws. She announced that she will not seek reelection on Sept.

Nelson Mandela, who is under a doctor's order to reduce his activities, has canceled a major speech at an anti-apartheid rally outside Parliament, the African National Congress said Wednesday. The 72-year-old ANC leader has maintained a punishing schedule since his release from prison last February, and the "traveling is killing him," ANC spokeswoman Thery Matlala told the independent South Africa Press Assn.

Heart-transplant pioneer Dr. Christiaan Barnard entered party politics Friday, vowing to campaign for the anti-apartheid Democratic Party in parliamentary elections in September. Barnard, who carried out the world's first heart transplant in 1967, told reporters at his home in Cape Town that he no longer has faith in the ruling National Party. The Democratic Party is the third-largest party in South Africa's whites-only House of Assembly.

Scott Kraft's excellent article on Andre Brink on April 17 has one significant misstatement. He says that Brink, as an Afrikaner, is a rarity in anti-apartheid literature. Fortunately, Brink has many peers in his Afrikaans community. A generation ago, when Afrikaans authors began to seriously attack the shibboleths of their society, the novelists earned the collective title Die Sestigers , or Men of the Sixties. One could name a dozen writers, including Prof. J. M. Coetzee of Pochefstroom University who won the coveted Booker Prize in England.

A powerful bomb early Wednesday wrecked a six-story office building in downtown Johannesburg that serves as headquarters of several leading anti-apartheid groups, including a religious council enmeshed in a church-state confrontation with the South African government. Twenty-three people were injured or treated for shock after the blast ripped through Khotso House, collapsing the main lobby into the basement and tearing off part of the building's facade.

More than 500 demonstrators, many of them high school students, crowded into a carport outside the South African Consulate on Monday to protest that country's apartheid policies and observe the birthday of the late Martin Luther King Jr. Although several demonstrators briefly blocked elevators leading to the Consulate's fourth-floor offices in the 9700 block of Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills police made no arrests.

The government said Saturday that a Vatican report condemning apartheid misrepresents South Africa's racial policies. The Foreign Affairs Department, in a statement, said it had not received a copy of the 45-page Vatican document released earlier in the day.

Black and white leaders of 90 of South Africa's Christian churches, concluding their first conference in nearly 30 years, joined Friday to reject apartheid as a sin and confess their own role in fostering segregation. The action was largely a symbolic gesture because each of the participating denominations, including the Dutch Reformed Church, has made similar statements individually in recent years. The white branch of the Dutch Reformed Church, whose 1.

A former special forces officer Thursday described killing hundreds of black prisoners and tossing their bodies from an airplane, in testimony that shed light on the horrors of South Africa's apartheid-era regime. Johan Theron's testimony for the first time crystallized the events of two decades ago.