"She Brings Us Together"

By JANICE C. SIMPSON

Young black militants, some bearing the green, gold and black colors of the outlawed African National Congress, stood shoulder to shoulder with conservatively dressed white matrons inside St. John's Methodist Church in a comfort able all-white neighborhood of Port Elizabeth. Together they sang freedom songs and prayed for a more peaceful future. For black and white South Africans, it was an unusual display of racial harmony. The occasion: the funeral of Molly Blackburn, a leading white antiapartheid activist who was killed in an automobile crash Dec. 28.

Blackburn, a 55-year-old mother of seven, was an active member of the Black Sash, a group of white women who campaign against apartheid. One of the government's most visible white opponents, she had been arrested several times for attending illegal gatherings with blacks and for entering black townships without permission. Blackburn was often the only white to attend mass funeral rallies for blacks who had died in the racial unrest of the past 16 months, and last week blacks paid tribute to her. "Africans in this country are walking tall on the road she has blazed," Black Activist Mkhuseli Jack told mourners who gathered inside the church for the 90-minute service. Outside, in an emotional farewell, some 20,000 blacks filled the streets. As the flower-draped coffin was loaded into the hearse, they raised their fists in the black-power salute of the A.N.C. and chanted in the Xhosa language, "She is a soldier." Said the Rev. Allan Boesak: "Molly continues in death what she did all her life. She brings us together."

Blackburn and Brian Bishop, a respected civil rights attorney, were killed while returning from a black township in the Eastern Cape, where they had been collecting affidavits from parents whose children were detained by security officials. Their car collided head on with an approaching vehicle. Bishop, Blackburn and the driver of the other vehicle were killed instantly.

The deaths of the two civil rights crusaders were a serious loss for the liberal opposition movement. Some antiapartheid activists openly wondered about the possibility of foul play. Both Blackburn and Bishop had been targets of harassment and death threats from angry whites who considered them traitors. In 1985 Bishop's car was fire bombed. Nonetheless, Bishop's wife and Blackburn's sister, both of whom survived the crash, told relatives that the collision appeared to be a genuine accident.

Blackburn's and Bishop's deaths tragically concluded a particularly turbulent year for South Africa. In all, some 850 Honor guard at Molly Blackburn's funeral people, most of them black, were killed in violence generated by unrest related to the struggle to end apartheid (see chart). Unhappily, 1986 got off to an equally bloody start. On Jan. 1 alone, there were 16 reported deaths. All of the victims were nonwhites and all of the incidents were fueled by racial conflicts.

On New Year's Day, a crowd of about 5,000 blacks defiantly stormed into an area reserved for Indians at a beach in Durban. During a 90-minute rampage, they beat up Indian bathers and stoned nearby cars. Police opened fire on the crowd, wounding nine and killing one. In Natal province, the fighting between the Zulu and Pondo tribes that began on Christmas Day continued, raising the death toll from 58 to 63. Although the conflict was apparently ignited by the rivalry between the tribes for jobs and housing, it could have been exacerbated by another factor: the Zulus are followers of Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the moderate Zulu leader who favors negotiation with the government, while many Pondos support the imprisoned A.N.C. leader Nelson Mandela. But the week's most violent encounter came at Moutse, 55 miles north of Pretoria, when members of the Pedi tribe resisted an incursion of Ndebele people who went into the area to claim it under the government's controversial homelands resettlement policy.

The government plan attempts to solve the country's racial problems by assigning blacks to rural territories, which are then offered independence, a move that effectively robs blacks of their South African citizenship. Since Transkei became the first homeland to be declared a sovereign state in 1976, only four of the ten territories in South Africa have accepted such terms for independence A fifth, KwaNdebele, named after the Ndebele tribe, has agreed to do so this year. The Pedi people object to being part of the KwaNdebele homeland because they do not want to lose their rights as South Africans. Their aggressive resistance has extended violence into a previously peaceful region and created yet another challenge to the government's struggle to maintain control over the country.

Pretoria unquestionably has its hands full. Officials continued to investigate the bombing of a shopping center in Amanzimtoti, 18 miles south of Durban, in which five whites were killed on Dec. 23. In Soweto, a citizens' committee, meeting to end a two-year-old school boycott by black youths, issued an ultimatum to the government: lift the state of emergency declared last July within three months or face "punitive sanctions" from the black community.

Another sensitive problem for Pretoria resurfaced last week when Winnie Mandela, wife of the jailed A.N.C. leader, once more challenged the order that bars her from the Johannesburg magisterial district by trying to return to her home in Soweto, the black township outside Johannesburg. Police forced her car to stop just as it crossed the district line and arrested Mandela for the second time in eight days. She was released on S200 bail on New Year's Day and went into seclusion. "She needs a rest," said a close family friend. "She has had a strenuous week." Indeed, as the death toll climbed to at least 24 by week's end, South Africans, black and white alike, braced them selves for what was already shaping up as a strenuous year. --By Janice C. Simpson. Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg

With reporting by Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg