‘Hit Back,’ S. African Blacks Urged : Activist Calls for Anti-Apartheid Boycotts, Strikes, Militias

Black South Africans were urged Saturday to begin “hitting back” against the country’s white minority regime, to turn their “anger into action” and to make the coming year “one of even greater resistance to apartheid.”

Stone Sizani, a leader of the United Democratic Front coalition of anti-apartheid groups, called for the strengthening of black consumer boycotts into a national movement, for industry-wide general strikes by black workers and for student protests larger than those that have kept black schools closed much of the past year.

“More than ever before, we must hit back,” Sizani told more than 10,000 mourners at a funeral here for 11 blacks who were among the 14 killed by police on a Sunday night three weeks ago. “There is nothing else we can do but hit back.”

“Hitting back,” Sizani suggested, may also include formation of black urban militias to “protect our people” and increased attacks by black guerrillas on selected white facilities to “inflict pain on them, like they do upon us.”

Youths Act Out Battles

As the funeral continued in a soccer stadium in Queenstown’s Mlungisi township, hundreds of black youths wearing homemade, military-style uniforms of khaki decorated with the black, green and gold colors of the outlawed African National Congress sang revolutionary songs about “killing the Boers,” as they call the white Afrikaners who hold most political power here, and with mock wooden rifles and pistols acted out battles in which the whites were killed in a hail of bullets.

“The United Democratic Front as an organization is committed to nonviolence and will remain so,” Sizani said later. “But apartheid is violence against us, and the people now ask, ‘How can nonviolence work against apartheid? When those who preach peaceful change are killed, gunned down, again and again, how can we continue with nonviolence?’

“The people are angry, increasingly so, and that is why I say that the time has come to hit back,” he continued. “Hitting back need not be violent, but we must inflict upon those whites who support apartheid all the pain we feel in the black community as a result of apartheid.”

Sizani’s call for greater black militancy, better community organization and more effective tactics was echoed by other speakers at the daylong funeral--which like most services for black victims of the continuing civil strife quickly became a political rally--and it appeared to signal a new phase in the struggle by South Africa’s 25 million blacks against apartheid, the government’s system of racial separation and minority white rule.

‘We Must Unite’

For the United Democratic Front, all but inactive since the crackdown on it more than four months ago, the call to “hit back” is almost a rallying cry.

“We did not come here to weep, but to draw strength,” said Curnick Ndlovu, national chairman of the United Democratic Front, which groups 650 organizations with more than 2 million members. “We must organize, we must unite throughout the country. . . . The coming days could prove decisive, and we must be prepared.”

Elijah Barayi, president of the new Congress of South African Trade Unions, formed last week to give black labor more political muscle, reiterated his threat to launch a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience in six months if the “pass laws” restricting the migration of blacks to urban areas and requiring them to get permits to work and live there are not repealed.

“We warn (President) P.W. Botha that we will not even pay rents and taxes,” Barayi declared. “We are on our grandparents’ land, and there is no need to pay rent or taxes.”

Unity Against Oppression

And Vusumzi Msauli, a Queenstown community leader, said: “When oppression intensifies, people come together and unite, and when they unite, oppression crumbles. Why can’t we follow the examples of Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Vietnam? In Vietnam, the strength of the people showed the American government that the people cannot be defeated.

“Your own hands are going to liberate you,” Msauli continued. “No one else can. Only through our own hands will we get freedom.”

Beneath the rhetoric, itself tougher and more focused than before, seems to lie a new resolve among most anti-apartheid activists to put aside their own political differences, to form a “united front” against the government and to concentrate their efforts on a direct-action program, which will sharpen the already daily confrontations with the regime even if it does not bring immediate changes.

Emerging from more than four months of hiding after the declaration of a partial state of emergency July 21, Sizani emphasized the need to strengthen organization within the black community as a precondition to broader protests.

Youths Organized

Militant black youths, widely known until now as “the comrades,” are being organized into trained, politically indoctrinated groups called amabutho. Mostly based on local “street committees,” these are meant to stand against the police but, more important, to organize the rest of the community to participate in consumer boycotts, rent strikes, general strikes and other protests.

“Until now, they have not been been part of the structure, though they have often been the most effective force in a community,” Sizani said. “Sometimes their methods are controversial--they are often accused by the authorities of intimidation--but we have to look at the circumstances in which they are operating. . . . If anything, (the black) adherence to peaceful change has been overdone. That’s why I say we must start hitting back.”

For blacks, Queenstown is a case in point.

A small trading center in the midst of the white-owned farms of eastern Cape province, Queenstown refused even to negotiate over black demands for improvements in Mlungisi, let alone broader political changes, and the town was hit by a black consumer boycott four months ago that continues today.

Toll May Be Near 40

Amid black charges of white police attacks upon them, police accusations of black attacks on other blacks and reported friction between blacks and mixed-race Coloreds in a neighboring township, Mlungisi has been in turmoil for six months. Seventeen people were reported killed Nov. 17 and during the next week, but the total death toll is said to be approaching 40 over the past six months.

“We must bankrupt the white merchants,” a local activist commented. “Only when the consumer boycott has achieved that will we be able to claim victory and then to negotiate as victors. . . . It is an unhappy, sometimes brutal business.”

Sizani sees an unprecedented national black consumer boycott growing out of this and tries to calculate how long it would take to bring an end to apartheid. To this he adds strikes by black workers, class boycotts by black students and other protests.

“In hitting back, we must make whites bear the cost of apartheid,” he commented. “Right now, blacks bear the full burden, and it is killing us, sometimes literally.”

Clashes With Police

The funeral Saturday for the 11 victims--three only 15 years old, two in their 60s and the others in their 20s--from earlier unrest nearly brought new clashes with the police.

After the burial, three police armored cars parked near the cemetery, angering blacks who felt not only that the police presence was provocative but that they had broken an earlier agreement to remain away. A police helicopter borrowed from the air force hovered overhead.

On the outskirts of the township, police roadblocks were set up to search all vehicles leaving Mlungisi for “arms, subversive literature and other contraband,” as a police warrant officer explained.

Only negotiations between the ministers at the funeral and the police averted an immediate confrontation, but many residents were predicting new clashes later in the weekend after visiting newsmen, opposition politicians and other whites left. “Today was a picnic compared to the war that may come tomorrow,” a local journalist said.