5 Reported Killed in Rioting in Black Suburb of Johannesburg

Daylong riots raged Monday in a black township that forms a pocket of squalor amid comfortable white suburbs north of Johannesburg. Residents said that five people were killed, including a black policeman.

Witnesses said the rioting was the worst in the three days of bloodshed in Alexandra township that started Saturday after funerals for two anti-apartheid activists. Some whites watched it from surrounding hills.

Confirmation of the deaths Monday would bring the death toll for the three days to eight.

Police said that three people were killed in Alexandra over the weekend, but they did not have complete casualty figures for Monday. They confirmed that a mob burned the black policeman’s home, shot him to death, then set his body ablaze.

Policemen and town councilors viewed as collaborators with the white government often have been killed by other blacks during 17 months of riots against apartheid. More than 1,100 people have been killed since the violence began, nearly all of them black.

Rumors swept Alexandra all day Monday. There were unconfirmed stories of a 3-year-old being killed and death counts as high as 10.

Police sealed off the township, and shops on its edges were closed. Gangs of young blacks could be seen in the streets, throwing up barricades of tires and rubbish and setting them afire. Burning cars littered the township.

Police appeared to concentrate on guarding the entrance roads and did not enter the township to confront the mobs.

Thick smoke rose from the streets, obscuring tennis courts and swimming pools in white suburban backyards that, in some cases, are only 100 yards from the township’s fringe.

Some of the white spectators wore sidearms, an increasingly common sight nowadays.

Alexandra’s situation, a patch of poverty in a sea of plenty, is rare in South Africa. Black residential districts usually are located far from white areas and major retail centers.

It is about six miles north of midtown Johannesburg and a mile east of Sandton City, a gleaming, expensive four-level shopping and hotel complex.

Residents of “Alex,” as the township is called, said that gangs of young black militants turned back people who were headed for their jobs before dawn Monday at a nearby complex of white-owned factories.

“The youths are in control today,” said a black woman who managed to slip out to her job as a fast-food restaurant cook.

Occasional shots could be heard.

At nightfall, black youngsters with sticks and whips, some fashioned from lengths of rubber hose, beat workers who had run the gantlet to their jobs and were coming home.