S. Africa Tribal War Leaves 42 Dead, More Than 6,000 Homeless

Tribal fighting left at least 42 people dead in the Durban area and 6,000 to 7,000 others homeless when many residents torched their own homes and fled the battle scene, police said Friday.

Durban police Capt. Winston Heunis said the devastated Umbumbulu shanty district, 20 miles southwest of Durban, was quiet Friday after two days of clashes between the Pondo tribe and the larger Zulu tribe. Heunis estimated that 2,000 shacks were destroyed.

Members of the Pondo tribe, who were squatting on Zulu land, chose to destroy their own homes rather than leave them for Zulus to seize when the Pondos fled, reporters at the scene said.

Earlier news reports estimated the homeless at up to 40,000, with tens of thousands fleeing, but Heunis said those figures were exaggerated.

Heading for Homeland

The Pondos, a clan of the Xhosa tribe, were heading toward the Transkei homeland for Xhosas, about 120 miles to the south.

Zulus, traditional inhabitants of the Durban area, have long been at odds with Pondos who come from impoverished Transkei to squat illegally in Zulu homeland areas while working in the Durban industrial region. The fighting broke out over Zulu objections to the Pondo squatters.

Pondo women stood beside roads with their children, a few possessions balanced on their heads as they awaited transportation. The South African Red Cross provided food and buses.

A total of 533 people, mostly Pondos, were arrested after the fighting Thursday and some appeared in court Friday on charges of public violence, Heunis said. He said police confiscated guns and ammunition, 343 spears, and hundreds of knives from the battlefield.

Apartheid, Tribal Rivalry

The feuding has claimed more than 100 lives in the region since November, including 60 slain on Christmas Eve.

While tribal rivalry has divided the two groups for years, opponents of the white-led government’s apartheid system say the policy of crowding blacks into rural homelands, with few job prospects, is a key factor in the dispute.

Meanwhile, in Krugersdorp, a white mining town 18 miles west of Johannesburg, about 500 whites packed a Dutch Reformed church for a funeral for two white policemen slain Tuesday by black rioters.

The two officers, the first white policemen to be slain since the unrest started in September, 1984, were killed when they tried to break up a meeting of miners in a field near a black township.

Sobbing relatives joined scores of uniformed police for the burial service, a sharp contrast to the defiant funerals for black riot victims that usually become anti-apartheid protests.

More than 1,000 people, nearly all of them black, have been killed in 17 months of anti-apartheid violence, most of it confined to black townships.

Also Friday, Winnie Mandela was presented with the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Human Rights Award in Sandton, a well-to-do Johannesburg suburb, by former U.S. Rep. John H. Buchanan.

Mandela, a leading activist and wife of jailed black leader Nelson Mandela, was prohibited from traveling to the United States in November to accept the award. So the Alabama Republican made the presentation while visiting South Africa for a conference, at the request of the Kennedy award trustees.