Tribal Battle in S. Africa Leaves 8 Dead

At least eight blacks were killed and dozens more were wounded as rival tribal groups, numbering more than 1,000 warriors each and fighting with spears, machetes and clubs, battled through the night until dawn Wednesday outside Durban.

Most of those killed were hacked to death as groups of Zulu and Pondo warriors, old rivals, fought up and down a hillside near the Durban airport in one of the most savage tribal clashes here in recent years, according to police. Others were stabbed to death with spears.

Zulus, who constitute the black majority around Durban and in most of South Africa’s Natal province, apparently were intent on forcing Pondo tribesmen, competitors for increasingly scarce jobs, to return to eastern Cape province or the Xhosa tribal homelands of Transkei and Ciskei.

Tension between the Pondos and the Zulus had been growing for more than a year in Malagazi, a hillside shantytown of more than 20,000 just south of Durban, and they had been aggravated by the rivalries between the outlawed African National Congress, supported by most Pondos, and the Zulus’ more moderate Inkatha political movement.

The number of dead could rise as high as 20, police said, with many of the wounded in critical condition and more bodies believed buried in the ashes of burned-out shacks at Malagazi. Heavily armed police patrols restored peace late Wednesday.

Three more blacks were killed in other incidents of black political in-fighting, police said, bringing the day’s death toll to at least 11.

Two local Inkatha officials were killed later Wednesday at Imbali, north of the Natal provincial capital of Pietermaritzburg, in what local police described as political murders. One man, chairman of the local taxi owners’ association, was shot and killed as he stopped to let a passenger alight from his van; the other man was found later stabbed to death at virtually the same spot along the road.

In Randfontein, west of Johannesburg, a black migrant laborer was beaten to death and his body burnt by black students in a continuing feud there between young militants and the older migrant workers over how to fight apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial separation and minority white rule. Police intervened to prevent youths from attacking the migrants’ hostel in a clash that would likely have brought more deaths. Two others, one a student and the other a migrant laborer, have been killed there in the past week.

Rumors, meanwhile, swept the country Wednesday evening that Nelson R. Mandela, jailed leader of the outlawed African National Congress, was about to be released after 24 years of imprisonment. He is serving a life sentence for sabotage.

Although Mandela, now 67, still refuses to accept government conditions for his release, including a formal renunciation of violence, President Pieter W. Botha is widely believed ready to grant Mandela a parole on compassionate grounds. Mandela presumably would qualify for such grounds because of recent surgery to remove an enlarged prostate gland and further operations planned to remove cysts from his liver and kidneys. By this reasoning, it is only political difficulties that have prevented Botha from granting the parole.

But a spokesman for the president dismissed the speculation about his imminent release as “wrong, just wrong,” and Mandela’s wife, Winnie, daughter Zinzi and lawyer Ismail Ayob all denied knowledge of any imminent release or the complex negotiations that would necessarily precede such a political about-face.

‘Will Stay Behind Bars’

To release an aged, infirm Mandela would be one thing, a high-ranking member of the ruling National Party commented, but to free a hale and hearty Mandela, the charismatic leader of black nationalism in South Africa, would be to commit the minority white government to negotiate with him and his allies the terms for the constitutional sharing of power between whites and blacks here. “We are not ready for that,” he commented, “and until we are, Mandela will stay behind bars.”

In other developments, police headquarters in Pretoria acknowledged that it seriously understated the number of blacks killed last Sunday in Queenstown in eastern Cape province when police fired shotguns and rifles at rioters. After initially reporting one death, then five and later nine, the police said Wednesday that the correct total was 14, explaining that reports of five bodies had been “overlooked.”

Police reports now put the number of deaths in the area at more than 30 in the past two weeks as the country’s civil strife continues to spread to new regions despite the government’s efforts to contain and curtail it.

In Soweto, the sprawling black satellite city outside Johannesburg, physicians and senior nurses put off a threatened work stoppage until courts could rule on the reinstatement of more than 1,700 student nurses and auxiliary workers dismissed last week after striking for higher pay (most get $60 or less a month) and better working conditions. The case is to be heard today.

The battle at Malagazi began when a Pondo chief was stabbed and seriously wounded Tuesday night in a confrontation with Zulus, and other Pondos set out to take revenge. Such battles occur periodically between rival tribes and among factions of the same tribe, particularly in Natal, the center of the nation’s 6 million Zulus.