Black Police Caught in Web of S. African Strife : Rejected by Whites, Burned Out by Their Own People; Few Quit

Constable William Mnguni will never forget the day: He was on patrol in Duduza, a black township east of Johannesburg, when he and his colleagues, seeing thick smoke, turned down the street where he lived. They found his home and car in flames and his terrified family hiding at a neighbor’s house.

“The kids burned me out,” Mnguni, 22, said. “They say they want to make a revolution against apartheid, and black policemen like me are in the way. So they burn our houses, threaten our families and try to kill us. But they have got it all wrong--I am not the enemy of our people. They are.”

In South Africa’s continuing civil unrest, black policemen like Mnguni are frequently the government’s front line of defense, a role that often leads to their rejection in their own communities. Still, few are willing to give up their jobs.

“I have no sympathy with these young people,” said Detective Sgt. Joel Msibi, 31, an 11-year veteran of the South African Police, 40% of whose 45,000 members are black. “They say they are fighting for liberation, but whom are they fighting? Our own people. And who is dying? Our own people.

Disagreement on Tactics

“I agree we need liberation, but these youths must do it the right way, go through the right channels, speak with the state president. . . . They are trying their level best in the government to bring the situation of blacks in this country up to that of whites.”

Msibi, Mnguni and other black policemen, accustomed to respect within their communities and proud of their achievement in winning highly competitive appointments to the police force on the same basis as white applicants, are deeply hurt by their almost total rejection now by other blacks.

“I never once thought they would turn against me after all I had done for the community,” said Detective Warrant Officer Templeton Sibaca, 42. “I had joined the police force about 16 years ago out of concern for my community. I was trained as a teacher, but I felt I could do more as a policeman. Over the years, I often received calls for help from the community, and I always obliged. At no time did I think that I--a resident of the community and not an outsider, someone who had been useful in the community--would end up being forced to flee.”

Sibaca, like Msibi and Mnguni, was burned out of his home in Duduza, a riot-torn black ghetto township of 40,000 north of here, and is now camped out at the Dunnottar police station, virtually a refugee in what is increasingly taking on the character of a civil war.

A “sixth sense” told Sibaca to leave one night four months ago during an all-night vigil for a schoolgirl killed in a clash with the police.

“I heard people chanting in the streets,” Sibaca said. “Their mood seemed to have changed. There was more anger in their voices. They were being incited by certain individuals. It was dangerous, I thought, for us to stay, and so we left quickly and quietly.”

While listening to the police radio next day, Sibaca heard that his house had been attacked with firebombs.

“When we went back, we found our house totally destroyed,” he said. “We lost everything.”

Living in Tents Now

There are 19 black policemen, including nine with their families, living in a dozen large army tents behind the Dunnottar station. This situation is repeated at virtually every police outpost in the Witwatersrand region around Johannesburg and in many areas of eastern Cape province as well.

“There is a very high-level effort to find them proper housing and to replace what they have lost,” police Maj. Piet Meiring said here. “They are all part of the family, and so we have to take care of them. Our goal is to get them into houses where it will be safe for them and their families, but the situation now is such that we cannot predict when that will be. We do not want to remove them permanently from the community, but they have to be able to live in the community safely.”

Most say they will never return to Duduza, although many were born and grew up there.

“Old friends won’t talk to me, won’t even greet me,” Msibi said. “It’s worse than that, because they are really after my blood.”

Msibi says he is “brave enough” to go back to Duduza on the job almost every day but, after three firebomb attacks that eventually destroyed his eight-room house, he is not going to move back because of his fears for his family.

“My boy can’t go to school because of these threats from the bigger kids,” he said. “If they can’t get me, they will get him.”

Threats from the criminals he arrests are part of every policeman’s life, a white officer, Kelly Gliddon, said, “but this is different, because these men’s lives and those of their families are threatened simply for being policemen.”

“I know policemen are often unpopular,” Sibaca commented, “but they don’t make the laws. They have to enforce those laws, however unpopular they might be. That’s true for all policemen, not just blacks and not just in South Africa.

“Until a few months ago, the black community accepted that we were doing a job that had to be done by someone--blacks want protection from criminals like anyone else--but now it has changed. People want us to quit the police force. They see us as enemies. There are instigators in our community, radicals who incite people’s anger, and we have suddenly become the targets for the most intense hatred.”

That has been true not only in much-troubled Duduza, where 120 black policemen lived, but in dozens of other black townships around Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage and the smaller cities that have been the focus of the continuing unrest.

More than 360 policemen have been burned out of their homes, according to police headquarters in Pretoria, and hundreds more have been moved out of their communities to safety. At least six black officers are believed to have been killed in these attacks, but a police spokesman said the number is kept secret “so that the enemy does not know how successful he has been.”

“When the police are having trouble protecting themselves, then you have a very dramatic indication of how serious the unrest has become,” a senior police officer, asking not to be quoted by name, said in Pretoria. “When policemen are forced to withdraw from their own communities, then you have evidence of how close we are to anarchy, because every society needs police. And when these policemen are black and their attackers are black, then the situation is clearly more complicated than just the black masses versus the white government.”

South African officials see the attacks on black policemen as part of an overall strategy developed by the outlawed African National Congress to turn the black townships into no-go areas for government authorities and to make the country increasingly ungovernable as a way of forcing the minority white regime to end apartheid.

“Policemen uphold the state’s authority and frequently constitute the only remaining government presence in times of trouble,” another senior police officer said, also asking not to be identified by name. “If the state is to be overthrown, the policemen must be removed first.”

Black policemen unhesitatingly declare their allegiance to the state but acknowledge little by little their anxieties during the past year of civil unrest, which has taken more than 500 lives, all but four of them black.

“It is very difficult these days being in the middle,” said Richard Mapheleba, a detective warrant officer with 28 years as a policeman. “I wanted to help my people by fighting crime--until this violence, it was the biggest problem of these townships--and the people were always with me. The way the people--everyone, even old friends--turned against us was a complete surprise to me.

“But what do I do now? Quit the police after so many years and with a family to support? Ignore all the crime because some kids say there is a revolution under way and we should have solidarity? Stop fighting for what I believe in? No, that’s not my way. My way is to stick with what I believe in and hold to that.”

A Different View

The youths, whose militant views increasingly shape those of the community at large, predictably see the role of the black policemen quite differently.

“They are the worst, the most brutal,” Marcus, a member of the Duduza branch of the Congress of South African Students, said, asking that his full name not be used. “The black police will beat you, shoot you for no reason. They are a bunch of thugs, rapists and murderers. Most are quite corrupt. When there is trouble, they just pull out their guns and start shooting, without even trying to calm things down. And when the security police come, they are quite happy to send us off to detention.”

Many of the black youths killed in the past six months have been shot by black policemen, often defending their homes against attack, and this has increased the community hostility toward them.

“They owe blood debts,” another Duduza resident, an officer of the Duduza Civic Assn., said, “and those debts will be collected, sooner or later, one way or another. . . . The people may not get them, but they will get their children or grandchildren. That sounds bloodthirsty and cruel, I realize, but these black cops are not only traitors to their people and to our liberation, but they have done terrible, terrible things to us. These are debts that can only be cleared with blood.”

Such hostility is not universal. The Rev. Henry Maphanga, pastor of Duduza’s Dutch Reformed Church, said: “As a Christian, I feel sympathy toward them (the black police officers). We don’t want them, and the whites don’t want them. But they are our brothers--they also are suffering as blacks--and this problem is really a misunderstanding among our people and not a fight with the enemy.”

But one black policeman who quit recently for political reasons said he did so to “join the people.”

Rothman Nqumashe, 32, who resigned after 12 years on the force, much of it as a warrant officer in the security police, said his friends and neighbors in Graaff-Reinet, in eastern Cape province, had kept asking him how he could justify staying on as a policeman, enforcing the laws of apartheid and dealing harshly with the present unrest. Finally, his mother questioned the wisdom of remaining a policeman, however much he loved the job and thought he was contributing to the community, if his people hated him for it.

“If I remained on the force, I thought, I might have been forced to shoot these people I live with, and I could not live with that,” Nqumashe said. “As a black, the day I die I will have to be buried by my people--that’s very important to us--but how could they do this if they knew I had killed some of them?”