Mandela Wife’s Home Attacked With Firebombs

The home of Winnie Mandela, wife of imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, was attacked with firebombs early Tuesday and extensively damaged.

Mrs. Mandela, 48, who has been in hiding in the Johannesburg area for the last week as the result of a police raid on the house in Brandfort, a remote town in the Orange Free State almost 200 miles southwest of here, was not home at the time. Her house was empty except for a cat that suffocated in the thick smoke.

While police blamed “unknown arsonists” and said that the incident will be investigated, the black nationalist leader’s wife charged that the government itself--probably the security police--was responsible.

‘What Government Does’

“This is what this apartheid government does,” she said on returning to Brandfort. “It has declared war on the oppressed people of this country. I feel like every other black man. What happened here is minute compared to what others in the (black ghetto) townships have suffered.”

Eleven people were killed in South Africa’s continuing civil strife Tuesday, according to police reports, as rioting flared again outside Durban, near East London, another Indian Ocean port, and in Witbank, a town in the eastern part of Transvaal province.

Three Indian men were stabbed to death, and their bodies were doused with gasoline and burned on a pile of tires by blacks outside Durban, raising fears of renewed clashes there between blacks and members of the Asian group. More than 70 people died in rioting around the city last week, and four more bodies were found Tuesday in the ashes of buildings burned then.

Incidents of unrest were also reported Tuesday in Soweto, the huge black township outside Johannesburg, where police and troops detained an entire secondary school of more than 400 students; in Mamelodi outside Pretoria, the capital, and in the eastern region of Cape province.

Over the last year, at least 606 people have been killed nationwide, according to statistics issued Tuesday by the South African Institute of Race Relations.

The state of emergency declared by President Pieter W. Botha three weeks ago, imposing virtual martial law in the black townships around Johannesburg, in the Vaal River region south of here and in the eastern Cape, appears to have reduced the level of unrest in most of those places--but is not preventing its spread to other areas that had been relatively calm.

Consumer boycotts launched over the weekend by blacks in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town are beginning to have an impact on white-owned businesses in the three cities, bringing calls by local chambers of commerce for urgent government action on black demands.

Speculation on Reforms

The authorities sought Tuesday to discourage further speculation that Botha will announce major political, economic and social reforms when he speaks to a meeting of his ruling National Party in Durban on Thursday. What he most likely will do, well-informed party sources said, is to reiterate his program of gradual change, which was outlined to Parliament in January and elaborated on in speeches in April and June.

Gerrit Viljoen, one of the Cabinet ministers in charge of black affairs, has said in two speeches to white audiences that reforms will be made only within the present political framework of racial separation; that housing, education and other facilities will continue to be segregated, and that change will be achieved in stages.

However, Viljoen warned South African whites to prepare for “many and drastic changes ahead” because “the white will exchange his former position of dominance and only decision-maker for one of a partner” in a system in which no racial group will have a decisive voice in the country’s affairs.

Murpheson Morobe, one of the few leaders of the multiracial United Democratic Front who has not been arrested, said at a clandestine press conference Tuesday that the government cannot restore peace without meeting basic black demands--among them universal suffrage, the release of all political prisoners, the revocation of bans on organizations such as the underground African National Congress, and an end to restrictions on where blacks can work and live.

“There must be moves by the government to restructure itself and abolish apartheid,” Morobe said. “We do not need a tinkering with the system.”

There was speculation that the attack on the Mandela home in Brandfort--which left in cinders all the contents of the small, four-room house and a nearby medical clinic that Mrs. Mandela runs--was the work of the right-wing death squads that have been held responsible for a series of recent murders of black leaders and attacks on their homes.

‘Future People’s Republic’

Speaking outside the charred shell of her small white bungalow in Brandfort, Winnie Mandela said: “What they were trying to destroy is a symbol of resistance. It was an attack on the future people’s republic here and on the African National Congress, and it was an attack on the freedom-loving people of South Africa.

“I will come back,” she vowed. “They will have to reconstruct my prison.”

A national figure in her own right, Winnie Mandela was banished by the government to Brandfort in 1977 to restrict her political activity. Under this South African form of internal exile, known as “banning,” she may be with only one other person at a time, may not make public appearances or be quoted in the domestic press, and may leave Brandfort only with police permission.

She was in Johannesburg last week for medical treatment when police raided her house in Brandfort, bombarding it with tear-gas grenades. Demonstrators demanding the release of her husband had fled inside the home when their protest outside was dispersed. Thirty people, including her sister, were arrested at that time. The Mandelas’ lawyer, Ismail Ayob, then arranged for her to stay in “a secret place of safety” in the Johannesburg area.

Winnie Mandela dismissed speculation, widespread here and abroad during the last week, that government is about to free her husband, who was first jailed in 1961 and is serving a life sentence for subversion and sabotage.

There has been no new offer, she said, and from President Botha down, the regime continues to insist that, as a condition of his release, he first renounce violence in the struggle against apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial separation, as well as white rule.

Remarks to U.S. Lawmaker

Botha said Tuesday that he will continue to insist on this condition before releasing Mandela, now 67. In a statement intended to clarify remarks he made Monday to Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D., N.Y.), the president said that those seeking Nelson Mandela’s release are not interested in his freedom as such but want him to “lead the movement of violence” in South Africa.

In another development Tuesday, the human rights group Amnesty International said it has received numerous reports of torture of political detainees in South Africa. It did not indicate the sources of the charges.

Several of the most serious incidents of unrest Tuesday occurred in Duncan Village, a black township of 35,000 near East London, where five people--four blacks and a man of mixed race--were reported killed in clashes with police that began late last week over a consumer boycott and student demonstrations.

In Witbank in eastern Transvaal, two youths were killed in separate incidents stemming from a protest over educational standards in black schools.