4 Killed as S. Africa Black Groups Battle for Influence

Four people, including two young children, were killed Saturday in new racial unrest as rival black political factions attacked each other in Port Elizabeth in eastern Cape province.

The children, both black, ages 3 and 5, were burned to death when their home in Port Elizabeth’s New Brighton township was firebombed, apparently by political rivals of their father, Gerald Mayekiso, a local leader of the Azanian People’s Organization. Their mother was hospitalized in critical condition with third-degree burns.

Another activist in the organization was killed by a group of “violent, radical young blacks” who stoned him to death in Kwazakele, another black township outside Port Elizabeth, police said.

The fourth victim, a 25-year-old man, was killed by police near Rocklands, also in eastern Cape province, a police spokesman in Pretoria said, after he “attacked a policeman with a knife” while officers tried to stop a group of blacks from stoning and attempting to burn a bus.

Most of the violence Saturday appeared to stem from the increasingly bitter rivalry between the Azanian People’s Organization and the United Democratic Front, which are battling for the leadership of South Africa’s 25 million blacks and of the anti-apartheid movement as racial unrest here enters its ninth month.

Members of the United Democratic Front and its affiliates fought other blacks belonging to the Azanian People’s Organization and its student group as they left funerals Saturday at Kwanobuhle township outside Uitenhage, near Port Elizabeth, according to black sources in the two cities, and the fighting continued late into the night.

Hostility between the two groups, equally opposed to apartheid but politically divided over leadership and strategy, has been mounting for the past six months, with each blaming the other for the heightened tensions.

The fundamental issue is ideological: Should the struggle against South Africa’s apartheid system of racial segregation be led by blacks in order to achieve black liberation, as the Azanian organization contends? Or should it be a multiracial struggle, including whites, for a future multiracial country, as the United Democratic Front believes?

The practical political issue today is which group will lead the black community in the current crisis and whose strategy will be adopted. Black political observers said the tensions between the rival political camps have led to violence in Port Elizabeth simply because the crisis there--more than 140 persons have died in eastern Cape province since January--is so intense.

“Each blames the other for the crisis and the police crackdown that has killed so many,” a neutral black physician said Saturday in Port Elizabeth. “Each says the other’s strategy is futile, a failure, and only endangers the community more.”