30,000 Rally at Funeral in S. Africa : Rites for 17 Slain Blacks Turned Into Anti-Apartheid Event

ALEXANDRA, South Africa — About 30,000 mourners, including diplomats from seven Western nations and a few hundred white South Africans, today turned a funeral for 17 black riot victims into a huge anti-apartheid rally.

“No one is free in this country as long as the black man is not free,” black leader Mike Beea told the throng. “We are simply saying, dismantle apartheid.”

Army helicopters hovered overhead and police armed with shotguns, rifles, pistols and whips watched from hillsides and used armored trucks to surround the ghetto of Alexandra, wedged among Johannesburg’s wealthiest white suburbs.

Two Cars Burned

Mobs torched two cars after the burial services, but authorities said they dispersed without further trouble and no police action was taken.

U.S. Consulate official Betsy Spiro was among Western diplomats at the seven-hour funeral for the 17 blacks, who were shot and killed by police in four days of rioting that erupted Feb. 14.

Authorities said that 23 people died in the rioting, but black civil rights leader Mack Lekota said at the funeral that the actual figure was closer to 50.

Black activist Winnie Mandela, wife of jailed black nationalist Nelson Mandela, attended and expressed “the deepest sympathy of the African National Congress,” an outlawed group dedicated to the overthrow of the white-minority government.

“We want everybody to know that even this is not too high a price to pay for freedom,” she said in a message that was read to the crowd.

‘Ever Forward’

The crowd of about 30,000 mourners waved flags of the banned congress and banners proclaiming “Ever forward, never backward.” Coffins were draped in the green, gold and black colors of the rebel movement.

Speakers at the funeral service in a dusty ghetto sports stadium demanded the release of Nelson Mandela, serving a life term for treason, and the abolition of the government’s policy of apartheid, or racial segregation.

More than 1,200 people--many of them blacks shot by police--have died in anti-apartheid violence in the last two years.

“It is a daily feature for us to bury our children,” said Albertina Sisulu, 67, co-president of the United Democratic Front, the largest legal opposition group in South Africa.

“You white mothers must say no when your children go to war. You should feel as our mothers do when there are 17 coffins lying here,” she said. “There is no peace in South Africa. What is happening to black children today will happen to white children tomorrow.”

After the service, mourners walked to a nearby cemetery singing the traditional lament, “Senzeni Na,” or “What Have We Done?”