S. Africa Black Leader Won’t Return to Exile

Black nationalist leader Winnie Mandela said today that she will spend tonight at her family home in Soweto, near Johannesburg, defying a government order to return to a remote place of banishment.

Mandela said she will return Saturday to Cape Town, where her guerrilla leader husband, Nelson, is recovering in a hospital from prostate gland surgery.

Pretoria had given Winnie Mandela until today to return to Brandfort in the Orange Free State under a 1977 banishment order, used by South Africa to put political opponents out of circulation.

She told reporters today at Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts Airport: “I will go to Soweto tonight and return to Cape Town tomorrow.” Soweto is South Africa’s biggest black township.

Mandela said earlier this week that she expected to be arrested if she did not return to Brandfort.

To Demolish Shantytown

A black newspaper, City Press, reported today that police want to uproot 3,000 people from a black shantytown they say they cannot control after killing 20 members of a funeral procession last spring.

The paper said officials plan to demolish Langa, a squalid collection of tin shacks outside Uitenhage and made infamous March 21 as the scene of South Africa’s worst mass slaughter in 25 years.

Police meanwhile reported killing one black man in Soweto--the first fatal clash between police and rioters in the Johannesburg ghetto in two weeks--and said the charred body of a black man was found in the eastern region of Cape province.

The deaths brought the toll in 14 months of racial violence in South Africa to at least 844.

That violence peaked last spring in Langa when police in two armored trucks confronted about 5,000 people marching to a funeral for blacks killed in previous clashes with police.