S. Africa Black Towns: Friends ‘Are Just Gone’ : Week of Emergency Rule Brings Nighttime Raids on Homes; Children Reported Taken

Rutherford Ndlovu woke up last Sunday to the rumble of armored cars rolling down his street, the loading of rifles and shotguns outside his bedroom window, and then the shouts of policemen and soldiers shooting off the locks of three neighboring houses and breaking down the doors.

“It was like one of those war movies when the Gestapo comes and arrests everyone, but this wasn’t on television--it was right next door,” Ndlovu said. “They took five of my friends. They are just gone--no one knows where they are, why they are being held or when, even whether, we will see them again.”

The 3 a.m. raid was Kwathema’s introduction to the state of emergency that President Pieter W. Botha had declared the previous night in 36 cities and towns in and around Johannesburg, in the neighboring Vaal River region, and in the eastern region of Cape province. The action followed nearly a year of civil strife that has left about 500 people dead.

At Every Corner

“Living in Kwathema now is like living under military occupation,” Ndlovu, 33, a machinist, said last week as an army patrol watched from across the street. “There are police and soldiers at almost every corner. We can’t move out of our houses freely. Anytime they find more than three or four people together, they fire tear gas and birdshot. At night, they shoot at anyone moving down the street. It’s like a foreign army has conquered us and is occupying Kwathema.

“People are taken away--where we are not sure--for no apparent reason,” he went on. “Dozens of kids, maybe hundreds, have been rounded up and sent off to the (rural tribal) homelands, and their parents don’t know where they are.

“Every civic leader, trade union leader, student leader in Kwathema has been detained under the emergency regulations--no charges, no visitors, no trial--and they won’t be released for months, if then. And some people, just ordinary moms and dads and kids, have simply disappeared--gone out for bread or something and not come back--and we are not sure what has happened to them, whether they are alive or dead.”

Ndlovu’s description of life in Kwathema, a black ghetto township of 170,000 people about 30 miles southeast of Johannesburg, is repeated over and over by residents of other townships--where the security forces have been given sweeping powers of arrest and search, the authority to impose curfews and seal off areas and, in the words of the emergency regulations, to undertake “any other action deemed necessary” to maintain order.

Fear of Rebel Recruitment

Kwathema has been “on the boil,” as another resident put it, since last September--when civil unrest first became serious. More than 40 townspeople are said to have lost their lives in recurrent clashes with the police.

In late June, four youths were killed and several injured when grenades they were going to throw at the homes of black policemen exploded in their hands, arousing fear by whites that the underground African National Congress was recruiting guerrillas in the townships. This, in turn, evoked charges by blacks that the police booby-trapped the grenades.

Three weeks ago, police shot and killed a number of youths--they said seven, but later, residents buried 15--in one of the bloodiest days in a year of sustained civil unrest.

Increasingly, the township had become a “no-go area” for the police unless they are accompanied by squads of soldiers, and the local government ceased to function except for providing the most rudimentary sanitation services.

In many respects before the state of emergency, Kwathema had become “ungovernable”--the operative word used by the African National Congress, which has instructed South Africa’s blacks to oust the white authorities and take over the running of their localities.

Armored cars full of policemen and soldiers--shotguns and tear-gas grenade launchers held ready--are on constant patrol. Groups that gather, whether on a street corner or outside a church, are quickly dispersed. Shotguns and rifles are fired at stone-throwing crowds. Police and soldiers man roadblocks, searching vehicles entering and leaving the township; outsiders, including reporters and liberal white politicians, are frequently barred from entering.

Working from Lists

In the early hours of each morning, squads of security policemen, working from long-prepared lists of local leaders and backed by soldiers, make their arrests--detaining 100 to 200 people a night, initially for 14 days.

The offices of civic associations, student groups, trade unions and other organizations fighting South Africa’s apartheid system are raided, their records and other documents are seized, and then they are padlocked.

“We feel like a conquered people,” Anglican Bishop Simeon Nkoane said while armored cars circled his Kwathema home. “President Botha said the state of emergency would bring peace, but how do you bring peace with guns? He said it would bring reform, but you don’t undertake reforms with more repression. He said our people wanted the government (to take steps) to end the violence in our townships, but more violence seems to be the result.”

(The emergency decree applies equally to whites in the 36 magisterial districts, which include Johannesburg and the industrial center of Port Elizabeth-Uitenhage, but so far it has had no impact on most whites beyond what little they see on state-guided television each evening or read in the self-censoring South African press. Of 1,086 people detained last week under the state-of-emergency regulations, only four were white--leftists involved in anti-apartheid groups.)

Legalizing Old Tactics

“The emergency powers legalized what the police were doing already, spread the terror many people were already living under and eliminated any legal recourse we might have had,” said Silas Nkanunu, a lawyer from New Brighton, a black township outside Port Elizabeth.

“Things are really, really bad now. The townships are like concentration camps. All vestiges of civil liberties are gone; all restraints upon the security forces are gone, and the possibilities for a peaceful solution of our problems are going, if they are not already gone.”

Although Botha has said that peace must be restored to the townships as a prerequisite for continuing the government’s program of political, economic and social reform and that the emergency decree was the only way to do it, Nkanunu and other black leaders say that, in fact, the emergency measures are further polarizing black and white South Africans and that the measures ignore the country’s fundamental problems.

Bishop Desmond Tutu, the black Anglican prelate of Johannesburg who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent opposition to South Africa’s system of racial separation, came to Kwathema last week to bury 15 victims of earlier unrest.

Tutu commented: “This government seems unaware that violence begets more violence, that the root causes for violence must be removed if violence is to be ended, that the time for dialogue is running short. . . . What they are doing now is making the situation worse, and I am really afraid that it may become irretrievable. Then we will face this ‘revolution’ the government is always talking about.”

Only Greater Bitterness

Lucas, a 27-year-old glass factory worker and an active trade unionist, who asked that his last name not be used--”to give my surname would be the same as ordering my coffin”-- said that under the emergency, the problems that have caused the civil strife would only be compounded. Blacks, he said, would become even more embittered by the harsh curbs.

“A year ago, the problem was not too difficult--our kids wanted a decent education, one that would let them get good jobs--and, had it been solved then, we might have made progress on other things,” Lucas went on. “But the government would not talk, would not compromise, would not reduce apartheid by even this little bit. So the problem got bigger and bigger, and we now have to fight for our rights.”

Anger among South Africa’s blacks has increased sharply over the last year, particularly among the 14 million urban blacks, and any remaining good will toward the country’s whites appears to be rapidly vanishing.

“The government is right when it says that violence will not solve any of our problems,” an English teacher from Kwathema said, asking not to be quoted by name out of fear of police reprisals, “but what the government does not realize is that most of the violence of the past year has stemmed from this apartheid system, that this is violence against the black people of South Africa and that our violence is a defensive reaction to what is really white aggression.

“The way to end violence, in other words, is to end apartheid and deal with our problems--not crack down harder, as they are doing now.”

This view is widely shared by liberal and moderate whites, who strongly urged the government during the last week to lift the emergency measures quickly--before they do irreparable damage to race relations, making resolution of the country’s problems that much more difficult.

‘Defeating Its Purpose’

Jan H. Steyn, a former Supreme Court justice who heads South Africa’s reformist Urban Foundation, said that if the state of emergency lasts “one day longer than necessary, it could well be perceived as repression, fanning the revolutionary flames in our society and thus defeating its purpose.”

South Africa has three basic choices, Steyn said--”reform, repression or revolution”--and is at a crossroads where the decision will determine the country’s future. “Of these alternatives,” he said, “real and fundamental reform remains the only viable option.”

The government does not dispute this, although its conception of reform differs greatly from those of such white liberals as Steyn and moderate black leaders like Tutu. But it argued strongly last week that reforms cannot proceed until the violence of the last year has been ended.

“The government does not doubt that the majority of South Africans desire a peaceful solution to our problems,” Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha said. “But there is too much at stake for all South Africans to allow that our country and our future be decided by people who burn others alive,” a reference to the punishment sometimes accorded suspected police informers in the townships.

“The organizers of violence in South Africa are not striving for an improvement of the living conditions of blacks or a system in which black leaders can have a say in decisions that affect them,” Foreign Minister Botha continued.

However, “the door is open for blacks who reject violence as a means of achieving political goals to promote black interests, including political rights, by means of discussion and negotiation.”

The steady escalation of violence over the last year has all but destroyed the community council system that the government had established in most black townships to develop a local political system. It was intended that these councils would cooperate with South Africa’s white leadership on a regional and national basis.

Most of the council members have resigned under community pressure, and many of those who did not resign have been assaulted, even killed, as collaborators. Homes and businesses have been firebombed. Black policemen have become the targets of firebombings, grenade attacks and mob violence over the last four months.

Moderates Reluctant

Government efforts to lure moderate blacks into dialogue have failed. President Botha’s offer in January of discussions on ways to share power has been turned down.

Even Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, head of the Zulu tribal homeland and leader of the Zulus’ million-member Inkatha political organization, who wants such discussions, refuses to participate unless the government pledges at the outset to end apartheid.

And the reforms approved during this year’s parliamentary sessions--legalization of interracial marriages and sexual relations, authorization of multiracial political parties, relaxation of controls on where blacks may live and work--did not deal with the blacks’ most fundamental grievances.

“We don’t want white women or white political parties,” Caiphus Motsoeneng, a quality-control clerk at a nearby glass factory, said in Kwathema. “What we want is a better education for our children, jobs for our young men, decent housing for our families. We want the police and the army out of the townships; we want these town councils abolished; we want to be citizens of South Africa.

“When the government talks about reform, it talks about everything except these things. Why? Because they would mean an end to apartheid, and that means an end to white power. When the government talks about reform, relaxing this and repealing that, it is really trying to strengthen apartheid and whites’ hold on power. And that is the real reason for all the violence.”

The state of emergency and the sweeping authority it has given the security forces appear to have reduced the amount of violence but not ended it, despite the widespread arrests and ready use of police firepower.

Removing the Leaders

Although Gen. Johan Coetzee, the national police commissioner, said that the number of incidents had been substantially cut, the major ones were as serious as those before the state of emergency was decreed. For example, four people were shot to death at Daveyton, near here, when a mob of 2,500 stoned an army patrol after a funeral for victims of earlier unrest.

But the government feels, according to police and other official sources, that the removal of hundreds of activists will “calm everyone down,” as a senior official put it late last week. “We are getting the ringleaders, the speechmakers, the organizers and the others who foment trouble, either by deed or word, and we are going to keep them inside as long as we can.”

There is also the conviction, among those who formulated the state-of-emergency strategy, that if the cycle of violence can be broken--so that one incident does not lead to two or three more--tension will ease and moderate leaders will emerge within the black community and take charge.

“We know that, at best, we are buying time, but we must do so in order to give the government that time to formulate a reform program,” another senior security officer said. “It is quite true, as all our critics say, that the state of emergency does not and cannot address the fundamental problems of our black people, or the country as a whole.

“But it is equally true that those problems cannot be dealt with while we have 30 or 40 serious incidents of unrest every day. . . . The methods may be harsh--if I were a black, I would probably think so, too--but the alternative of greater violence is far worse.”