OVATION FOR KENNEDY

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31082, 10 June 1966, Page 11

OVATION FOR KENNEDY

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) JOHANNESBURG, June 9. Senator Robert Kennedy, of the United States, flies north today to continue his tour of Africa, pleading for racial equality.

He is due in Tanzania after a four-day visit to South Africa. During his visit, he criticised South Africa’s apartheid policies. Senator Kennedy is expected to tell Tanzanians about his South African experiences immediately he arrives in Dar-Es-Salaam by charter plane. He will hold talks with President Julius Nyerere, inspect development projects and see African wildlife. The former United States Attorney-General was thunderously applauded in Johannesburg last night after a final passionate plea for racial equality. Making the last major address of his tour at Witwatersrand University, Senator Kennedy was given a standing ovation when he warned: “Where men can be deprived because their skin Is blade, in the fullness of time others will be deprived because their skin is white.”

Senator Kennedy, carried shoulder-high into the university’s great hall, called for an open dialogue between South Africa and the rest of the world.

“The day is long past when any nation could retreat behind walls of stone or curtains of iron or bamboo,” he said. Those who cut themselves off from ideas and

clashing convictions encouraged the forces of violence and passion, which were the only alternatives to reason.

Referring to the Government boycott of his visit, Senator Kennedy said that, although the Government had declined to allow him to speak with its members, people who supported the Government had invited him to talk with them.

Earlier Senator Kennedy had been mobbed by a cheering crowd of 1000 whites, Indians and Africans in the heart of Johannesburg. At one stage he was forced to lie i flat on the roof of his car to escape the wellwishers. During a tour of Soweto, an African township near Johannesburg, he told a huge I crowd that racial discrimination was disappearing in the I

United States and would disappear in South Africa as well.

He was loudly cheered when be spoke of his early-morning meeting with the 1961 Nobel peace prize winner, the former Chief, Albert Luthuli.

The picture shows Senator Kennedy talking to Chief Albert Luthuli, who is living in restriction in Groutvllle.