South Africa Shooting Spree

It was one of the bloodiest 24-hour periods since the recent round of violent racial unrest began in September 1984, and it pushed the total number of deaths to more than 1,300. At least 30 blacks were killed in confrontations with police, marking a sharp increase in the rate of killings just three weeks after State President P.W. Botha lifted a state of emergency, declaring that such incidents had diminished. (

Most of the deaths occurred during two fusillades by police. The worst confrontation took place on a soccer field in the nominally independent Bophuthatswana homeland, north of Pretoria, where more than 5,000 people had gathered to protest the arrest and detention of local youths. Local police claimed that when they ordered the crowd to disperse, the demonstrators retaliated by pelting them with stones and Molotov cocktails. Panicky officers opened fire, and in the melee that followed, eleven protesters were killed, 100 wounded and as many as 2,000 arrested.

In the black township of Kwazekele, outside Port Elizabeth, police who had taken up positions inside a liquor store shot nine people dead when the place was attacked by some 100 rioters. Two other township residents were killed in unrelated incidents. Liquor stores have long been the target of black activists because they are often owned by black officials who are regarded as collaborators with the white apartheid regime.

The upsurge in killings may be the first in a new series of violent confrontations in the embattled country. Black activist groups were planning a meeting in Durban last weekend that could result in renewed boycotts of schools. In an effort to squelch future civil disobedience, Minister of Law and Order Louis Le Grange declared that, as of April 1, all such meetings would be forbidden under the Internal Security Act.

As that restriction was imposed, others were unraveling. The courts continued last week to lift the banning and detention orders that have prevented hundreds of activists from speaking out or attending public meetings. More than 20 people, including Black Community Leaders Mkhuseli Jack and Henry Fazzie, have had such orders rescinded by courts in the past month on the ground that the government had failed to cite adequate reasons to justify them legally. While some, like Jack and Fazzie, had been banned only recently, last week Rowley Arenstein, a white former Communist leader, was "unbanned" for the first time in 33 years. But the court actions may be only a temporary setback for government officials, who are free to reimpose the bans if they can show legal cause for doing so.