Apartheid Foe Arrested Before Americans Visit

A leading white opponent of South Africa’s system of racial segregation was arrested Tuesday, an hour before she was to meet with two former U.S. Cabinet members investigating the current unrest here.

Molly Blackburn, a member of the Cape of Good Hope provincial legislature from the liberal opposition Progressive Federal Party, was charged under the country’s Internal Security Act with participating in an illegal gathering 10 days ago and taken to court in New Brighton, a black township outside Port Elizabeth.

Vance Meeting Due

Blackburn was due to meet in Port Elizabeth, an industrial city on the Indian Ocean coast, with former Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and former U.N. Ambassador Donald F. McHenry, who are visiting South Africa as members of a Ford Foundation study group.

Freed on $50 bail, she met later with McHenry and other members of the Ford group, although not with Vance or McNamara, who had moved on to the city of Durban.

“The sole intention of this nonsensical action was intimidation,” said Herbert Hirsch, the opposition leader in the Cape provincial council, noting that only Blackburn, 54, the mother of seven, had been arrested from among the 15,000 people who attended the memorial meeting for four murdered black activists.

Meanwhile, Bishop Desmond Tutu, speaking at a mass funeral for 15 people killed in earlier unrest, appealed for calm and castigated blacks who kill black officials and black policemen considered to be collaborators in apartheid, the system of racial separation. Such killings make it “difficult to speak up for your liberation,” the Nobel Peace Prize laureate told 25,000 mourners.

About 2,500 youths returning from the same funeral reportedly stoned the house of a local black official in Kwathema, about 30 miles southeast of Johannesburg, before he drove them off with birdshot. Police used tear gas to disperse other groups of youths after the funeral.

Despite considerable tension in the troubled township, no other serious incidents were reported after Tutu’s appeal for calm and his strong condemnation of the fatal beating and immolation of a suspected police informer, a 25-year-old woman, in nearby Duduza on Saturday.

“I understand that when people are angry, when they are hurt, they want to take it out on collaborators, our co-oppressors,” Tutu said at the funeral. “But our cause is a just one, and we cannot use methods to attain the goal of liberation that our enemy uses against us. . . .

“If you do this again, I will find it difficult to speak up for our liberation. If we use the methods that we saw in Duduza, then I will collect my family and leave a country I love passionately.”

Police reported Tuesday that they have detained 441 people, including four whites, during the first two days of the state of emergency proclaimed over the weekend in 36 cities and towns in and around Johannesburg, the Vaal River region south of here and in eastern Cape province.

Civil rights and church groups monitoring security detentions estimated that 80 to 100 more people may have been taken into custody on Tuesday under emergency regulations permitting indefinite detention, without charges or trial, of any person the government considers a threat to public order.

Primary Targets

A preliminary analysis of the detentions by the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee showed that the primary targets were community leaders and political activists belonging to the United Democratic Front, a coalition of 650 anti-apartheid groups with about 2 million members.

Security police on Tuesday also searched the national headquarters of the United Democratic Front, seized records and publications and sealed the offices, effectively shutting down its operations here.