S. African Clashes Erupt After Funeral for Boy, 13

At least four people were killed as violence flared over the weekend around South Africa.

One black youth and possibly a second were reported killed at Atteridgeville, a black ghetto township outside Pretoria, the capital, during clashes Sunday that followed the funeral for a 13-year-old boy. The boy was allegedly beaten and kicked to death by four white policemen while he was on his way to church last Sunday.

Mourners said one youth was killed when he was hit in the face at close range by a tear-gas grenade in the angry confrontations between youths and police that followed the funeral. The second youth was believed to have died in a fire begun after tear-gas grenades were fired into his house.

However, a police spokesman could only confirm the intense three-hour clashes, including an attack that injured a police constable, but not the reported deaths. More than 15,000 attended the funeral in Atteridgeville.

At Sterkstroom, a small town in eastern Cape province, a 40-year-old black teacher, Melina Fus, died when her home was firebombed early Sunday. Police said they did not know the motive for the attack, but theorized she was killed because she may have been viewed by other blacks as a collaborator with the white regime.

Near Tzaneen in the northeast, Ngoaku Ramalepe, chairman of the student council at Modjaji College of Education, was hacked to death with machetes. Ramalepe had made the council and the Kgapane Youth Congress two of the region’s strongest members in the United Democratic Front, the coalition of anti-apartheid groups. Police have not established a motive for this attack, either.

In violence Saturday in and near Cape Town, focus of much of the recent unrest, police acknowledged that they shot and killed a black man, about 25, when they opened fire on a group of 400 blacks. Members of the group were stoning them and erecting barricades of burning beer crates to prevent police vehicles from entering the township of Langa.

A 27-year-old Colored (mixed-race) man was killed and two companions wounded when a white motorist, trapped with his father by a stone-throwing mob, opened fire with his pistol near Bellville. The two whites both suffered minor injuries, police said. The driver, V.A. Momberg, 27, fired four shots before the mob fled.

In Port Elizabeth, on the Indian Ocean, the home of a prominent white businessmen who has campaigned hard against apartheid was destroyed by a bomb and a fire that followed the blast.

Dan (Cheeky) Watson, a star of South African rugby, and his family--along with his brother Valence and the brother’s family, who also lived in the house--were away at the time, but two black guards were seriously burned. Dan Watson and his three brothers, who operate a chain of men’s clothing stores, have been threatened repeatedly because of their anti-apartheid efforts.

Meanwhile, a leader of the African National Congress said at a news conference in the Bahamas, where the Commonwealth nations are discusing South Africa, that his black nationalist group will carry its struggle into white areas of the country but hopes to avoid all-out racial war.

“I am mindful of the fact that we will be soon involved in national reconciliation, and we want to avoid undue deepening of scars that we have to heal,” said Johnstone Makatini, head of the organization’s international section, Reuters news agency reported.