Indians In Phoenix, South Africa, Still Live In Apartheid's Shade

PHOENIX, South Africa - Dayanand Samsunder watches people flow daily into the Phoenix Working Committee office, where anyone of any color may seek shelter from apartheid. The committee deals with evictions, removals, detentions and other indignities imposed by apartheid.

Yet neither blacks nor people of mixed race seek help here. Only Indians arrive at the office's battered front door, for Phoenix is an Indian township created for Indians only. Here, even the anti-apartheid office is segregated.

``Blacks and coloreds can come, of course,'' said Samsunder, a small, stooped Indian of 57 who works in the office. ``But why should they? This is an Indian area. They never come here. This is the way people are still thinking. That's apartheid, man.''

A new South African government has declared apartheid dead and promised political rights for all, but apartheid is alive and well in Phoenix. To Samsunder, who was born in an Indians-only area and expects to die in one, the ``new South Africa'' promised by President F.W. de Klerk looks a lot like the old one.

For as far as Samsunder can see, there are Indians living around him, in dull apartment clusters or in one-story boxes like his home.

Beyond the horizon, there are millions of blacks in the jumbled townships and squatter camps that lurch toward the interior of Natal province. Down the coast, there is stately Durban, populated by whites.

In Phoenix, Samsunder is an Indian among Indians. He is still identified in a hundred little ways as an Indian, separate and distinct from the other colors and races that make up South Africa. The laws of the land say Indians must live in their own areas, so Phoenix was created years ago to house the Indians who flocked to the Natal coast in search of work.

The township is the legacy of the Group Areas Act, an efficient 1953 law that succeeded beyond the expectations of apartheid's architects. Even with the dramatic political changes pushed forward by de Klerk, South Africa's races are still strangers to each other.

Samsunder has no friends among the millions of blacks, whites and mixed-race people surrounding Phoenix. Indians, in particular, have been forced to live as a separate people since the first Indians arrived a century ago to work the sugar-cane and tea plantations.

``We've been taught so long to stay apart that now it's second nature to us,'' Samsunder said one day over the shrieks of Indian children playing outside his home. ``We hear about all these changes coming, but we haven't changed ourselves. We're still Indians first, South Africans second.''

At 900,000, Indians are by far the smallest of what South Africa calls its four ``population groups.'' By most reckonings, they rate a shade above ``coloureds'' - mixed-race people - on the racial-status chart of apartheid, but well below whites and a step or two above blacks.

Like the coloreds, Indians have a segregated chamber of the Parliament and segregated ``administrations'' that handle schools, communities and other ``own affairs.'' Like the whites, they have mercantile clout. But like the blacks, they are dark of skin and thus condemned to inequities.

Ordinary Indians like Samsunder see no immediate escape, no matter how many apartheid reforms are forged by de Klerk, no matter now many breakthrough meetings are attended by black and white leaders. Apartheid attitudes persist. Race-based traditions die hard.

Samsunder's son, Anesh, 17, has never had a friend of another race. He attends an Indian-run school, where just 10 of the 900 pupils are black, and where even those 10 have provoked complaints from the Indian ``own affairs'' council for violating Indians-only principles.

In South Africa, Indians and blacks share a common history of resistance to white rule. Indian groups joined with the African National Congress in the ``defiance campaign'' against apartheid laws in 1950s. Many Indians now hold leadership positions in the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front. When Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders were in prison, their contact with the outside world came through their Indian lawyers.

Yet Indians and blacks have often been at odds. In 1949, Indians were killed when black rioters swept through Indian areas around Durban. In 1985, riots again erupted as blacks drove Indians from their homes near the Zulu tribal homeland.

Indians were so terrified that they removed artifacts from the Mahatma Gandhi home and library, then torched the historical site to keep blacks from destroying it first.

In February, some in the crowd celebrating Mandela's release looted and burned Indian-owned shops in Durban. The leader of the Natal Indian Congress, a pro-ANC group, warned Indians of a black plot to attack Indian areas and ``teach the Indians a lesson.'' Many blacks have long resented the Indians' comparative wealth.

``The outside world thinks everything is OK now, with Mandela out and de Klerk making all these promises,'' Samsunder said. ``But everyone has the same old fears.''

Though the ANC and Indian groups have long been united, Samsunder said, many Indians view the ANC strictly as a tool of black advancement.

``They don't see that the ANC is nonracial, that it can create a better life for everyone, Indians included,'' he said.

``De Klerk has taken chances, but he's had to,'' Samsunder said. ``He knows he has to give in, so he's doing it now in hopes he won't have to go all the way later.''