Into a Season of Smoke and Fire

A midwinter cold snap hit South Africa last week, bringing snow to some areas and subfreezing temperatures everywhere. Over a number of the black townships that are often wreathed in coal-fire smog, there arose, too, the smoke and flames of arson and the swirling white clouds of police tear gas. By week's end, at least 34 blacks had been killed and 150 injured in renewed rioting across the country. After the June toll of 176 dead in Johannesburg's Soweto township, the eruption of violence raised anew the question of whether South Africa can avoid outright racial war. So far, the white centers remain peaceful, but their long-term prospects are not good.

Black Power. The new fighting started in Langa township, outside Cape Town, the nation's second largest city, where several hundred black students marched out of the Langa high school, formed a phalanx on an adjoining athletic field and began chanting for "black power." Police, using bullhorns, warned them to disperse. The students answered with clenched-fist salutes and a barrage of rocks and bottles. Tear gas disrupted the demonstration, but not for long. Then the police turned fierce Alsatian dogs loose on the students. The police waded in after them for what one observer contemptuously called "a first-class Kaffir-bashing." When night fell, the students were joined by workmen returning from their jobs in Cape

Town, and the mob set afire more than a score of buildings--beer halls, liquor stores, schools, post offices--in Langa and two other townships. Several cars, too, were stopped, overturned and put to the torch. That was when the police started shooting. Twenty-seven people died that night.

Next day some 1,000 blacks rushed the Langa police station. The police again opened fire and killed at least two more people. Other demonstrators set up roadblocks and stoned trains and buses to prevent workers from going to their jobs in Cape Town. There, as in Johannesburg's Soweto, the tactic failed to disrupt business and industry seriously, but managed to intimidate many black workers. As one Johannesburg worker told Lee Griggs, TIME'S Africa bureau chief: "They scare me. This morning some young ones tried to make me stay in Soweto. 'Do not go,' they said. 'Today we march and we may get shot. You must stay home and be here to bury us.' Nobody ever said things like that in Soweto before."

When the current round of rioting broke out in Soweto this month, white officials started talking about a new deal for blacks. Early last week Justice Minister James Kruger declared: "Make no mistake. The government will not turn a deaf ear to black grievances. I want blacks to have far more say in areas relating to law and order, and I hope all policing of black townships can soon be done by blacks themselves." But government attitudes quickly hardened. After remaining silent for nearly a week, Prime Minister John Vorster warned: "If there are grievances, the door is open to hear those grievances, but the government will certainly not be railroaded into panic action." Later Kruger refused to meet with black leaders. "If the students think they can get concessions by rioting," he said, "they are making a very big mistake."

From Johannesburg, Correspondent Griggs reported: "A disturbing pattern is beginning to emerge. Riots break out and the government talks of conciliation. Then violence dies down and the government talks tough and refuses concessions, thereby inviting still more disturbances. Unless the Vorster government is prepared to come up with such concessions as land ownership and perhaps citizenship within white South Africa's black areas--and not just citizenship in the autonomous homelands --trouble in the townships seems bound to continue."

If South Africa's internal troubles could be isolated from what is taking place beyond its borders, Vorster's government could undoubtedly stand the strain. But the external pressure grows ever more intense. Gone are the Portuguese bulwarks of Angola and Mozambique, transformed into militant leftist states. In neighboring Namibia (South West Africa), a onetime League of Nations mandated territory that South Africa has been running since 1920, a guerrilla rebellion is smoldering on. To the north, in Rhodesia, a far more serious guerrilla war is in its fourth year, and last week it threatened to explode into all-out righting.

The white settlers who live along Rhodesia's 800-mile border with Mozambique have long been urging Prime Minister Ian Smith to strike back at the black guerrillas who are based behind that border. Last week, after a guerrilla raid in which five Rhodesian soldiers were killed, Smith did just that. He sent a large mechanized force 25 miles into Mozambican territory, where it inflicted the heaviest casualties so far. According to Salisbury, 340 guerrillas were killed in the raid. Mozambique, however, claimed that the Rhodesians had struck a refugee camp killing more than 600 civilians.

The raid did wonders for the white Rhodesians' morale. Some of them broke out champagne and compared the operation to Israel's rescue of hostages at Entebbe Airport last month. As the euphoria wore off, however, there were some sober second thoughts on whether Mozambique might now declare all-out war on Rhodesia. Opposition Leader Allan Savory of the Rhodesia Party warned his countrymen, "The long-term effect of this strike will be to escalate the war."

Retaliation came quickly from Mozambique. The following morning, a mortar-and-rocket barrage struck the outskirts of Umtali, causing several hundred whites to be evacuated to the Hotel Cecil in the center of town. Umtali officials gamely announced that the annual agricultural show would open on schedule, but the thud of exploding shells heard clearly throughout the city that morning gave residents a grim reminder that they were within easy range of the 10,000-man Mozambican army. It was the first bombardment of a Rhodesian city since the guerrilla campaign began in earnest in December 1972, and it was not likely to be the last.

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