50 Protest Internship Program

More than 20 Black South Africans and about 30 students gathered outside Massachusetts Hall Saturday to protest Harvard's fledgling South African Internship program.

The members of the Boston Union of Black South Africans and the Harvard students protested the program for about an hour, charging that Harvard did not adequately consult Black South Africans about the implications of the internship program in that racially torn nation.

The internship program will send Harvard students to South Africa for a year where they will work in educational institutions that help Black South Africans, according to Vice President and General Counsel Daniel Steiner '54, who chairs the committee overseeing the program.

Some faculty members and students have criticized the program, which is in its first year, charging that it serves a Black elite and legitimizes the apartheid regime of that nation.

Black South African speakers at the rally said Harvard failed to conult them and the proper Black political leaders in South Africa about how to best use the $1 million dollar fund set aside by President Derek C. Bok in September to help South African Blacks.

By failing to consult Black South Africans the Steiner Committee acted exactly like the "nationalist government of South Africa by undermining efforts by Blacks to direct their own destiny in questions that directly affect them," said Moses Nkondo, a visiting scholar in Currier House and one of the five speakers at the rally.