South Africa Rising Defiance

By Pico Iyer.

Bearing staffs and walking with purpose, 25 South African churchmen of all races, led by Bishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, marched on Johannesburg's police headquarters last week. There they lodged a protest against the government's six-month-long detention of a black priest. A week earlier 239 demonstrators in a similar march in Cape Town had been arrested; this time policemen simply took names and photographs while the clergymen sang hymns.

Nonetheless, nonviolence remained the exception in South Africa rather than the rule. Two days before the clerics' protest, black women outside Johannesburg's regional court building chanted their approval as young blacks thrust clenched fists into the air amid shouts of "Power!" When a white - security man trained a video camera on the demonstrators, some of them stared back at him and silently drew their fingers across their throats. Eventually, with riot policemen watching from the turrets of two armed personnel carriers, 14 black prisoners were led out of the building and driven away to the Fort, Johannesburg's historic prison.

That scene presented an eloquent tableau of South Africa today: the white minority government on the defensive as black defiance quickens around it. The incident also dramatized the efforts of the authorities to crack down on protesters they describe as radicals: the 14 men bundled away were being held on unspecified charges of high treason. In all, about 50 blacks are facing similar accusations. Yet the government's attempt to beat down continuing black unrest has seemed only to fan it further: as a result of clashes in the past two weeks, nearly all of them in the volatile Eastern Cape region, more than 40 blacks have been killed.

A key point of contention last week remained the police shooting of 19 blacks on March 21 near the white town of Uitenhage. Testifying before Judge Douglas Kannemeyer, the government-appointed investigator of the killings, Lieut. John Fouche, 43, the officer in charge of the police detachment at Uitenhage, acknowledged indirectly that the official explanation of the incident was wrong on at least three counts. Minister of Law and Order Louis LeGrange had contended that some of the 4,000 black marchers provoked the police gunfire. Fouche, however, admitted that the demonstrators had not, as claimed, thrown gasoline bombs at the police, had not surrounded the 19-man unit, and had not been led by a man wielding a brick. Soon afterward, Colonel Adolf Charlton Van Rooyen, chief of the South African riot police, testified that two days before the killings the police had been instructed to "eliminate" marchers throwing gasoline bombs.

Even as the damning evidence mounted, violence continued to spiral. In the Eastern Cape township of Kwazakele, policemen armed with birdshot, rubber bullets and tear gas opened fire on a crowd of blacks returning from a funeral; ten people were injured, one of whom later died. Not far away, township blacks were turning on neighbors they regarded as sympathetic to the authorities. In Motherwell, a young woman burned to death after the home of her employer, a black town councilor, was set ablaze by gasoline bombs. In Veeplaas, near Uitenhage, nine shacks went up in flames, and a one-year-old child died in the conflagration. The country, said the Rev. Christiaan Beyers Naude, the white general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, was "entering a state of civil war."

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg