Hundreds of Schools Shut in Cape Town to Quell Riots

The government closed hundreds of schools Friday in townships around Cape Town, and said it will impose tougher measures there to quell a surge of rioting against white rule.

Questions arose about the health of Nelson Mandela, the black leader who has been in prison for more than 20 years. The prison service said only that he was examined Thursday by a urologist.

A lawyer for Mandela’s wife, Winnie, said she was “frantic with worry” and wanted a family doctor to see her husband. The lawyer, Ismail Ayob, said Mrs. Mandela was “not reassured at all by this bland statement” from the prison service and he would seek a court order for an independent examination.

Mandela, 67, “was in very good health” Aug. 9, the last time his wife visited him, the lawyer said, and Ayob had been assured after a similar examination three months ago that Mandela did not suffer from kidney problems.

South Africa’s battered currency, the rand, slipped again on currency markets. The government indicated that it might lengthen a four-month moratorium it declared on repayment of prinicpal on loans from American, British and European banks.

The rand’s difficulties reflect international concern after a year of racial violence in which more than 650 people have been killed, nearly all of them black.

Along with continued rioting in the black and mixed-race suburbs of Cape Town, violence also was reported Friday near the Indian Ocean port of Durban. Police fired shotguns and rubber bullets to disperse crowds of stone-throwing black students in Durban, according to witness Phillip Mzobe, a high school principal.

In Cape Town, 600 miles down the coast, police said they opened fire on three men who threw gasoline bombs at the home of Dennis de la Cruz, a member of the mixed-race legislative chamber established last year. They said one was wounded and all were arrested. No one in the house was hurt, police said.

Mixed-race and Asian politicians who were elected to the legislative bodies established for those minorities have been attacked as sellouts by blacks.

Police say 31 people have been killed and hundreds wounded since Aug. 28 in rioting around Cape Town against apartheid, which guarantees supremacy for South Africa’s 5 million whites and denies the vote to 24 million blacks.

Closing the schools locks out about 360,000 students of mixed race, who are called coloreds in South Africa. A government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said riots around the schools made it impossible to guarantee the safety of students and teachers.

Louis le Grange, law and order minister, said there will be harsher measures if rioting continues.

He was not specific, but said the state of emergency imposed July 21 on 36 black areas had reduced the rioting there. That indicated that the decree, which gives police the power to arrest without charge, might be extended to Cape Town districts.

Most observers say the army and police started the violence around Cape Town by beating demonstrators planning a peaceful march to Pollsmoor Prison Aug. 28 to demand Mandela’s release.

Mandela, leader of the now banned African National Congress, was convicted of plotting sabotage and was sentenced in 1964 to life in prison.

There have been periodic rumors for years about his health, and the government scotched one in 1983 by allowing white anti-apartheid legislator Helen Suzman to visit him.