Bomb Kills 6 in S. Africa Shopping Area

A powerful bomb exploded Monday morning south of Durban at a suburban shopping center filled with Christmas crowds, killing at least six people, including four children, and injuring more than 60.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the blast, although the outlawed African National Congress has said that its guerrillas planted most of the bombs that have exploded in the Durban area over the last year.

All the known dead Monday were white--the youngest was 2 years old--and the blast, following another bomb in Durban on Saturday and a land-mine explosion that killed six people 10 days ago, brought angry calls from whites throughout the country for vengeance.

But the explosion also evoked warnings that South Africa is quickly moving toward civil war.

‘Beirut-Type Situation’

“Violence cannot solve South Africa’s problems, and if one side escalates violence, then the opposite side must be expected also to escalate,” Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the powerful Zulu leader, warned in Durban. “At this rate, we will soon be faced with a Beirut-type situation in this country.”

So powerful was the explosion at the shopping center at Amanzimtoti, a popular resort 20 miles south of Durban, that bodies were hurled dozens of feet, the limbs of some victims were ripped off and the plate glass windows of the center’s stores were turned into a shower of deadly shrapnel.

“The carnage was ghastly, beyond description,” said Richard Macomber, a vacationing stockbroker, who helped give first aid to the victims. “Children looked like twisted, broken dolls, adults were lying in big pools of blood. Some people were so cut up by the glass that they looked like they had been machine-gunned. . . .”

The dead included two boys about 2 years old, an 8-year-old boy, a girl, 16, and two women in their 40s. Most were on holiday from the Johannesburg area.

Higher Toll Indicated

Unconfirmed reports put the death toll at seven or eight, including a black worker at the shopping center. Hospital spokesmen said more than 20 of the injured were in serious or critical condition.

In other developments Monday, Winnie Mandela, wife of imprisoned black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela, was released on her own recognizance after being arrested Sunday at her home in Soweto, the black satellite city outside Johannesburg, for defying a government order banning her from the Johannesburg area.

She was not asked to plead when she appeared before a magistrate in a courtroom packed with her supporters and journalists here. She will reappear in court Jan. 22. If convicted of violating the government order, which actually relaxed many of the previous restrictions imposed on her, she could be sentenced to three years in prison.

Under the previous order, Mandela was restricted to her home in the small farming town of Brandfort, 225 miles south of here in the Orange Free State. Under the new order, she may live outside Brandfort but not in Soweto.

Hundreds of blacks greeted her with shouts of “Viva Winnie!” and “Viva Mandela!” and clenched-fist salutes when she left the courthouse in downtown Johannesburg after a night in jail.

She then returned to Soweto, saying, “That is my home, and that is where I intend to live unless they put me in prison.” Another confrontation with the security police, the third in three days, seemed imminent until she left for Cape Town and a Christmas visit to her husband, who is serving a life sentence for sabotage.

U.S. Protests Arrest

The Reagan Administration on Monday lodged a formal protest with the South African Embassy in Washington, deploring the arrest and urging the government “to refrain from such repressive measures and move toward discussions with the leaders of the black community.”

“Our consistent policy has been to reject any banning and any arrest stemming from a banning order,” said White House spokesman Larry Speakes.

In an additional show of concern, a representative of the U.S. Consulate in Johannesburg attended Mandela’s hearing Monday.

In diplomatic parlance, South Africa “noted” the U.S. protest--that is, it received it but offered no response. Speakes said a reply is expected “in due course.”

Meanwhile, two blacks were killed Monday afternoon in Soweto when police fired shotguns to disperse a crowd returning from the funeral of a suspected African National Congress guerrilla killed last week when a grenade he was handling exploded. The mourners had marched to the cemetery under the flags of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, both of which are outlawed here.

Shooting at Roadblock

Another black died in Sebokeng in the Vaal River region south of here after being shot by a businessman, also black, at a roadblock set up by youths enforcing a black consumer boycott of white merchants.

And in Moutse, about 60 miles north of Pretoria, a man was shot to death, apparently in a clash with police. He was the third to die there in a week in protests by blacks over plans to incorporate the area into a tribal homeland.

Police said they arrested 227 people throughout the country Monday in efforts to curtail the continuing unrest.

In Durban, police said that the Amanzimtoti bomb, planted either in or beside a trash bin shortly before it exploded about 11 a.m., could only have been aimed at the crowd of Christmas shoppers since there are no government or military facilities in the area.

‘Scene From Hell’

“This was a scene from hell,” said Larry Oosthuizen, a merchant with a store across from the shopping center. “There were horribly mutilated bodies lying all over the ground. A thick, black, stinking smoke covered everything. Women were screaming, searching for their children and finding them all cut and bleeding.”

The African National Congress, which said last month it had launched a “general escalation” of its guerrilla attacks on white targets here, had no immediate comment at its headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, on the Amanzimtoti explosion.

Political analysts recalled, however, that the congress decided at a special conference in June to hit civilian as well as military targets in escalating the guerrilla war that it has waged for the last 25 years. In recent radio broadcasts, it has called on supporters to carry their attacks into white neighborhoods, business districts and vacation areas.

If it was the work of black guerrillas, the bomb at Amanzimtoti ranks as one of the deadliest attacks by the African National Congress in a quarter century. The most devastating strike was a car bomb that exploded on a crowded Pretoria street in May, 1983, killing 19 and wounding more than 200.

‘Cowardly Murderers’

Louis le Grange, the minister of law and order, interrupted his vacation to rush to the scene Monday, promising an all-out police effort to “track down these cowardly murderers.”

On Saturday, nine people were injured when an explosive device was placed under a van occupied only by two white children, girls aged 4 and 9, on a downtown Durban street crowded with Christmas shoppers. Both girls were hurt along with their mother, three clerks in a nearby store and several passers-by. Police said the only possible targets were civilians.

Ten days ago, two adults and four children, members of two families, were killed when a land mine exploded under their truck while they were driving through a game farm at dusk. Altogether, seven mines have exploded in the area, near the Limpopo River separating South Africa from Zimbabwe, and four others have been discovered and defused by the army.

The deaths of so many white civilians--12 in the past 10 days, most of them children--seem certain to increase white demands for tougher government action to deal with the country’s continuing civil strife as well as to harden white resistance to reforms of South Africa’s apartheid system of racial separation and minority white rule.

Call for Retaliation

“The government must send the army to wipe out all the African National Congress terrorist bases in Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Botswana and all the other neighboring countries and even its headquarters in Zambia,” Koos van der Merwe, a member of Parliament from the right-wing Conservative Party, said in Johannesburg. “Otherwise, there will be more of these cowardly attacks, and more of our people will die.”

Horace van Rensburg, a member of Parliament from the liberal white opposition Progressive Federal Party, called for national unity against “the wave of mindless terrorist attacks against innocent civilians by violent revolutionary forces.”

“We cannot afford to be seen to be divided or uncertain in the face of this threat to life and stability in this country,” Van Rensburg said, suggesting that the government can count on support from usually critical white liberals in dealing with terrorism and unrest.

But Sheena Duncan, president of the Black Sash, a white women’s group opposed to apartheid that monitors human rights here, warned that the increasing terrorist attacks as well as heightened violence in the country’s black townships could mean civil war.