Youth Killed, Others Reported Injured on Soweto Anniversary

A black youth was killed and a number of others were reported injured Sunday in anti-government protests that followed the annual memorial services for those who died during the the 1976 racial unrest that began in nearby Soweto.

The youth was shot and killed by guards protecting the home of the mayor of Daveyton, a black ghetto township east of Johannesburg, from a crowd that had stoned it and threatened to burn it down, according to police.

The home of a black town councilor at Nyanga, outside Cape Town, was attacked with a hand grenade earlier Sunday in the latest of a series of attacks, one of which seriously wounded a Colored (mixed-race) deputy Cabinet minister. Police chased and fired at two men, wounding and arresting one.

Outside Durban on the Indian Ocean coast, a bomb heavily damaged government offices in a black township, a police spokesman said, but no injuries were reported. In Durban itself, a group of about 200 black youths stoned passing cars and trucks in a rare incident of black rioting in a white city.

Two more bombs were safely removed from a hotel in East London in eastern Cape province, the focus of much of the recent unrest.

Elsewhere in Cape province, police said they fired buckshot and rubber bullets at crowds throwing firebombs at homes of town councilors and local businessmen and at passing cars. Two explosive devices were thrown at the house of a town councilor in New Brighton outside Port Elizabeth, causing considerable damage but no injuries.

And in Soweto, Johannesburg’s black sister city of more than 1.5 million, police used tear gas to break up groups of youths, numbering about 500, who had stoned their armored cars after a memorial service at Regina Mundi Roman Catholic Church.

More incidents were reported after memorial meetings in other black townships east and west of Johannesburg in the Witwatersrand region and around Port Elizabeth.