South Africa the Fires of Anger

By Pico Iyer

The Eastern Cape, one of South Africa's major industrial regions, was simmering. Police in armored vehicles patrolled black townships, while groups of black youths waited for a chance to vent their anger. Here and there, buildings smoldered, streets were barricaded. Less than a week earlier, 25 years to the day after the Sharpeville massacre of 69 black South Africans by security forces, the police had gunned down 19 black demonstrators near Uitenhage, 20 miles from Port Elizabeth, the Eastern Cape's largest city.

In the days that followed, there were scattered incidents of black turning on black, and at least 20 more people lost their lives. In several townships, crowds set the homes of black policemen ablaze in vengeance against those they took to be stooges of the white minority government. In Kwanobuhle, an impoverished black settlement of about 50,000, a mob descended upon the home of a black town councilor, hacked the man, his two sons and two employees to death, torched the house, then dragged the charred corpses into the open, where youngsters chanted around them. "Enough!" pleaded Johannesburg's Rand Daily Mail. "This country is tearing itself apart. We are writing our history in blood."

Last week the government of Executive President P.W. Botha tried to douse the fire--and in the process only added fuel to it. First, Botha convened a joint session of the three houses of Parliament--for whites, "coloreds" (of mixed race) and Indians--to call for an end to violence. In his televised address, the President also declared, ominously, that he was taking "necessary steps" to restore law-and-order. As he spoke, police in the Eastern Cape reported killing three blacks in clashes with township dwellers.

Two days later, the government banned 29 black organizations from holding any meetings over the next three months in 18 districts, mainly in the Eastern Cape. Among the groups was the broadly based antiapartheid alliance known as the United Democratic Front, 16 of whose leaders already face charges of treason. The ban, said the Rev. Christiaan Beyers Naude, an Afrikaner who is general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, was "an act of desperation on the part of the government."

Certainly, South Africa's white rulers, faced with parliamentary protest at home, threats of economic sanctions from abroad and a profound unrest kindled by one of the country's worst recessions in 50 years, seemed increasingly to be on the defensive. Yet, as ever, the more pressure exerted on the leadership, the deeper it dug in its heels, and the more it retreated into kragdadigheid, or a mailed-fist attitude. In an interview on ABC's Nightline program, Botha declared defiantly, "I am going to keep order in South Africa, and nobody is going to stop me."

The week began with the most dramatic show of civil disobedience in South Africa in several years. About 300 protesters of all races, led by Naude and the Rev. Allan Boesak, the colored minister who heads the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, marched on Parliament in Cape Town to deliver a petition. In it, they demanded that the government keep police out of black townships and speak to "leaders chosen by the people, not government-chosen community leaders." When police told the group to disperse, the demonstrators knelt and sang Onward, Christian Soldiers, before being bundled into police vans. In all, 239 were arrested; all of them refused $25 admission-of-guilt fines and, though released, were ordered to appear in court in June.

At the same time, the police explanation of the Uitenhage tragedy, the bloodiest in South Africa since Sharpeville, opened a Pandora's box of controversy. Minister of Law and Order Louis Le- Grange initially told Parliament that the 4,000 demonstrators had provoked the gunfire by flinging stones and gasoline bombs at policemen. In a later statement he said the demonstrators threatened to march on white sections of the town. He also claimed that the police had fired a warning shot and that only one of their armored trucks was in the area.

When the government-appointed investigator, Eastern Cape Judge Douglas Kannemeyer, began his inquiry into the Uitenhage events last week, however, Warrant Officer Jacobus Pentz said that two police vehicles had been near by. He testified that gasoline bombs had not been thrown at the policemen and that the demonstrators had not, as claimed, posed an "immediate threat." LeGrange's account, Pentz said, might have been "a little exaggerated."

The debate did not end there. In a 52-page report on the killings, the white parliamentary opposition, the Progressive Federal Party, maintained that the "warning shot" had hit a black on a bicycle. "Have you ever tried riding uphill while throwing stones at the police?" challenged P.F.P. Member Helen Suzman. Boesak, for his part, said that according to township residents, the policemen had not only placed sticks and stones in the hands of the dead to make them appear to have been aggressors but had also shot some who had already been injured. "This," said Boesak, "was summary execution and cold- blooded murder."

The government tried repeatedly to quell the uproar. Minister of Justice Kobie Coetsee urged that the Uitenhage affair not be discussed in Parliament until Kannemeyer presented his findings; Johan Greeff, the Speaker, rejected the plea. In his parliamentary address the next day, Botha made an appeal similar to Coetsee's. It was ironic, he said, that the need for strict law enforcement had arisen just as his government was hoping to extend black rights. Still, he stood firmly behind the embattled LeGrange. The President even contrived to place the blame for the upheaval on opponents of apartheid, pointedly lamenting the persistence of those who protest "under the guise of moral and religious conviction." Such people, he said, were determined to foment unrest and see the country "go up in flames."

Whether or not the police opened fire without provocation, the very suspicion that they had done so was enough to inflame passions. "The whole area is like a tinderbox," said Opposition M.P. Dr. Alex Boraine in describing the Eastern Cape. "Almost without exception, every day of the week somebody is being killed somewhere. The majority of whites have no idea how endemic violence is in this country. Neither does the government." Others were even harsher. "The Eastern Cape can best be viewed as Gestapo country," charged John Dugard, law professor at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand. "The President has no control of the police, and they are allowed to do what they like."

The spiraling distrust between blacks and the authorities was emphasized by the government in its attempts to dramatize how some blacks had set upon others. That image was something of an oversimplification. In many townships, the local police force, though usually commanded by white officers, is composed almost entirely of blacks, some from distant regions and hostile tribes. Among the men who opened fire at Uitenhage, for example, were Zulus from Natal province, whom the predominantly Xhosa people of the Eastern Cape have traditionally regarded as enemies. These age-old animosities have served to aggravate friction. "If there were a riot in Soweto tomorrow," said a Johannesburg security consultant, "black police units would be in the front line and would probably open fire on crowds even sooner than would whites."

The other great split in the black community, an economic one, has widened as South Africa's financial situation has deteriorated. Thanks to some of the government's modest reforms in recent years, more and more black businessmen have entered the middle class, striking up deals with white entrepreneurs, buying 99-year leases on their homes and even hiring strong-arm thugs for security purposes. At the same time, many of their township neighbors have been pitched deeper and deeper into poverty. With unemployment on the rise and the general sales tax doubling to 12% over the past year, the gap between relatively comfortable and impoverished blacks has widened. "The problem here is that some people are just going down and down and some are going up and up," said James Thabane, a black clerk who lives in Sharpeville. "There is real hatred here. Sometimes I think that blacks are their own worst enemies --all the whites have to do is let them tear themselves apart."

The rift has complicated the debate in the U.S., South Africa's largest trading partner, about the wisdom of launching a so-called disinvestment campaign in which U.S. firms doing business in South Africa would withdraw their investments and terminate all dealings with the country. Last week the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 14 to 0 in favor of phased economic sanctions against Pretoria. The main argument against disinvestment, made even by some of the enemies of apartheid, is that such a punitive measure would hit hardest those whom it is designed to help: the 23 million voteless blacks. To that, many South African blacks reply that they are already so powerless that they have nothing left to lose. Nonetheless, the fact remains that economic sanctions not only might leave the South African economy fundamentally undamaged but might actually prompt the government to clamp down with greater severity than ever. Disinvestment, President Botha has warned, would lead to "poverty and a bloodbath." Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha has proved to be even more combative. "We reject demands and prescriptions," he thundered in Parliament last month. "We beat the arms embargo, we beat the oil embargo, and with the help of the country, we'll beat this threat."

As the government has stubbornly clung to its power, the blacks, politically shackled and economically cornered, find themselves trapped. "I am a ) stranger in my own land," said Thomazile Mpetla, 24, a resident of Langa township, near Uitenhage. "If you have no work, you are not a man. I am not a man. I lost my job last year. So we exist. My father went to Port Elizabeth to look for work five years ago, and we never heard of him again. At night now we stay indoors and we hear the noise of gunfire. It gets so you don't notice it anymore."

Yet the gunshots will prove more and more difficult to ignore. The government's violent reaction to protest and the counterviolence that inevitably erupts have convinced many South Africans, black and white, that the vicious circle will continue--and grow worse. The fear was most hauntingly expressed by a cartoon in the Johannesburg Star. The drawing showed three gravestones. The first said "Sharpeville. 1960." The second read "Uitenhage. 1985." The third tombstone said "Watch This Space."

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg