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Godfrey Pitje, the doyen of Black Lawyers in South Africa commented to me on the National Forum initiative. ‘Chris Heunis' Black Forum is not only too little, too late, it's a project that's been set up the wrong way. If Heunis and the present government are sincere, the very first thing they should do is scrap the present constitution, which is radicalistic from A to Z, because if they would do that, they would open the doors for other people to come in than the figures they have managed to get for the nfbl so far. Why is there still a tri-cameral parliament when there are 28 million blacks in this country? Precisely because whites did not want to sit side by side with coloureds and Indians. That's why the Reverend Allan Hendrickse of the Labour Party had a problem the other day in Port Elizabeth, when he tried to swim at a white beach. He had to endure shock waves, even from the State President himself. He was, believe it or not, called upon to apologise for his behaviour.’
I replied, ‘All these matters are a problem of mind. The mind is always inundated with concepts that clash with the times.’ Lawyer Pitje: ‘You put it beautifully. That indeed is the trouble.’ ‘But the Hendrickse affair,’ I said, ‘is now behind us.’ Pitje: ‘I wish it were, I am talking of the present, not the past. Take the Group Areas Act: it's still on the statute books. So, you marry a man or a woman, only to find out later that you cannot live as husband and wife. That is, unless there is a reclassification. If the white man is prepared to be reclassified as a non-white, then he can go and stay elsewhere. But under present legislation, it is not possible for a coloured or a black person to be re-classified. But a white man can move into another racial classification.’
‘Are you hopeful,’ I asked, ‘that Mr FW de Klerk will give a new im-
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