In December 1975 three hotels and five restaurants in Namibia were granted "international status" by the South African authorities and thereby allowed to open their doors to all races. The decision came as part of a series of moves to reduce the level of "petty apartheid" in Windhoek and elsewhere, in line with similar adjustments in South Africa itself.
Now, two months later, the experiment at one of the hotels, the Kaiser Krone in Windhoek, has been abruptly terminated by politically-inspired violence on the part of white vigilantes, police and plain-clothes men. The Kaiser Krone made use of its "international" status to introduce multi-racial dances, and quickly became a prime target for threatening and anonymous phone calls. Near the end of the year an attempt was made to burn the building down with a fire-bomb. Then, halfway through January, as guests were beginning to leave at the close of a Saturday night dance, five Afrikaans-speaking whites arrived at the reception desk and began to "terrorise" a Coloured man. Using abusive and threatening language, they blocked the exit door and punched the manager when he tried to intervene. The police, when called, merely joined forces with the gang in indiscriminately attacking and beating up both guests and management.
In the weeks that followed, members of the hotel staff continued to be severely victimised and the Manager, whose children, he claimed, were being ostracised at school and persecuted by both schoolmates and teachers, announced that he would shortly be moving to Cape Town.
Meanwhile, the official policy of desegregation has been put into reverse. The Kalahari Sands Hotel in Windhoek, which had been serving Africans on an informal basis for eight months with, according to the management, "no incidents or trouble whatsoever", was told that this practice must cease until such time as the hotel received an official "international" rating.
