Eartha Kitt as an 'honorary white'
From Life Magazine's June 2nd, 1972 issue:
The party in Cape Town, South Africa, had been an all-white affair until the guest of honor arrived. As she did, a black waiter offered a tray of hors d'oeuvres. She plucked the tray away, handed it to a guest and danced across the floor with the waiter.
"Then everyone joined in," exults entertainer Eartha Kitt, "guests, waiters, and all. Man did we integrate that party."
Integration in apartheid South Africa is seldom that easy, or that fun. During her six-week tour there, Eartha Kitt has been forced to play to segregated houses, as the law dictates, alternating between all-white audiences and nonwhites. This week she is facing the same system in neighboring Rhodesia.
Off stage, she was accepted by South Africans as a sort of "honorary white": living in the best hotels, drinking in white-only bars, riding in white-only elevators, and once, watching Parliament from a white-only gallery. There were occasional snubs. She and her 10-year-old daughter Kitt McDonald were turned away from an amusement park ride, but the following day they received flowers, an apology from the manager and an invitation to return.
Eartha also spent long gloomy hours wandering through run down "coloured" sections. "I could feel the tension and I absorbed it," she says. "I lost ten pounds. I aged a hundred years."
By charging white audiences stiff admission fees, she says, she has been able to offer lower ticket prices to nonwhites.
"Other guys come here from overseas and do their shows and clear out with the money tight in their pockets," she says contemptuously. At her urging, businessmen have set up an organization to raise money for cultural events for nonwhites. They plan to ask visiting to donate portions to their concert fees.
How will American blacks react when she returns from performing in a segregated country? "I'm sure I'll be criticized", she says. "But I'm an adventurer. I believe I'm doing something for the nonwhites by being here. Not coming would mean not knowing what it's like here and -- not caring."
