Mandela's visible legacy: South Africa's interracial couples no longer need to hide

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - South African couple Thithi Nteta and Dylan Lloyd have different accounts of how they met and fell in love...

Luther Vandross was outed as gay after his death.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — South African couple Thithi Nteta and Dylan Lloyd have different accounts of how they met and fell in love.

“We were friends for about a year,” said Nteta, a 28-year-old stylist.

“I like to say that I was courting her for about a year,” said Lloyd, 38.

One thing they agree on is that neither considered the other’s race before deciding to become involved – even though Nteta is black and Lloyd white and they live in South Africa, a country still healing the wounds caused by apartheid.

Twenty-five years ago, strict laws against relationships between whites and so-called non-whites would have made their love illegal.

During the apartheid era, homes of couples discovered to be breaking the laws were raided, and their bed sheets often checked and removed in case they needed to be used in court to prove illicit relations.

The ban on mixed marriage, designed to enforce total racial segregation, was ended in 1985 – one of the early reforms that signaled the end of white minority rule, culminating in the release of democracy icon Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison.

When he was elected president in 1994, Mandela declared: “We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity — a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.”

And now, relationships between people of different races in South Africa are seen as a sign of the integration and reconciliation espoused by Mandela after he strode out of prison a free man.

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