Zulu Killed as S. African Blacks Feud

A prominent Zulu politician was assassinated outside his home near Durban early Tuesday in the continuing feuding among South Africa’s black groups for leadership of the anti-apartheid struggle.

Francis Dlamini, a member of the central committee of the Zulu political movement Inkatha, was killed by by multiple shotgun blasts when he fled his home after it had been set on fire.

Dlamini’s son, who was shot in the shoulder, told police that the gunmen had first fired rifle bullets through the window and then thrown firebombs. The blaze forced the two men outside, where they were hit by the shotgun fire.

Four other people, three blacks and a Colored (of mixed race), died in other violence, according to police, as security forces sought to quell the continuing unrest around Cape Town and in the eastern part of Cape province.

Dlamini’s slaying, the latest in a series of politically inspired murders and assaults around Durban, raised fears of renewed large-scale clashes there between Inkatha members and supporters of the rival United Democratic Front and the outlawed African National Congress.

Political Murder

“Killing for political purposes has clearly come to stay in black politics,” said the Zulu leader, Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, in a statement in Ulundi, capital of the Zulu homeland.

Dlamini, who was a member of the homeland’s legislature as well as of Inkatha’s policy-making central committee, was a longtime political colleague of Buthelezi and a friend for 30 years, the chief said.

Buthelezi left little doubt that he blamed the outlawed African National Congress, whose leadership of South Africa’s blacks he is challenging. “I cannot say what motivated whoever killed him,” Buthelezi continued, “but it is difficult not to conclude in the current climate in black politics . . . that he was killed for political purposes.”

More than 70 people died in fierce fighting around Durban after the murder in August of Victoria Mxenge, a civil rights lawyer active in the United Democratic Front.

Police have made no arrests in that case--nor in the murder four years earlier of her husband, Griffiths Mxenge, also a lawyer and anti-apartheid activist. Her children said earlier this week that their house has come under intermittent attack, forcing them to move.

Disloyalty Charged

Over the last six weeks, there have been scores of attacks among the rival black groups, and the death toll since the August fighting was put Tuesday at 16 by observers in Durban.

The dispute between Inkatha and the African National Congress originally revolved around Buthelezi’s decision to accept leadership of the Zulu homeland, which many blacks see as supporting apartheid. But the conflict has intensified recently with Buthelezi’s expressed willingness to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement with the Pretoria government under certain conditions and to reach compromises that will give whites the security they seek if they yield some of their present power.

Meanwhile, two more people were killed near Cape Town. The charred body of a black woman, apparently the victim of the ritualized immolation often used against suspected police informers, was found in the Crossroads squatter settlement. A mixed-race youth was shot and killed by a truck driver who said he had been in a crowd stoning his vehicle.

In black townships near Port Elizabeth, a mob attacked and stabbed to death a black youth, and police said they shot and killed a man in a stone-throwing crowd.