S. Africa Violence Spreads to Tribal Area

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Seven blacks were killed in weekend clashes with the police in the South African tribal homeland of Lebowa, authorities there said Monday, as the country’s unremitting civil strife erupted in yet another area.

Altogether, 24 people died in violence over the weekend after the lifting Friday of the seven-month-long state of emergency, which gave police virtual martial-law powers but failed to end the nation’s continuing unrest. Among the dead were nine killed in renewed fighting between rival Zulu clans near Durban.

Lebowa police said that six people were shot to death Saturday morning while attacking a police station at Motatema, a black township outside Groblersdal, 125 miles northeast of here, and that a seventh was killed later when police fired shotguns to disperse a mob stoning a post office near Potgietersrus, 60 miles farther north.

But Motatema residents said that the six who died there had been cut down in a heavy crossfire between the Lebowa police and South African troops after police tried to stop hundreds of mourners from attending the funeral of a victim of earlier unrest.

‘No Option’

Brig. W. G. Beetge, the Lebowa police commissioner, said the trouble began after the funeral when a mob of about 2,000 besieged the Motatema police station, stoning and hurling firebombs at it, and that police “had no option” but to open fire with rifles.

Motatema residents, however, said that the incident, one of the most serious in more than a year and a half of racial unrest, had grown out of weeks of smaller clashes between black youths and the police in Lebowa, the homeland for Pedi tribesmen who speak the North Sotho dialect. Blacks there had also tried to organize consumer boycotts and general strikes to press demands for improved living conditions, higher wages and better education.

Meanwhile, a black American church worker, Beth Burris, 31, of Indianapolis, said Monday that she was severely beaten by police in another incident in Lebowa on Saturday. A black policeman, disregarding her shouts that she was an American missionary, whipped her for nearly 10 minutes, Burris said, during a raid on a Lutheran church at Seshego, a township near Pietersburg in northern Transvaal province.

Police said on Monday that they had broken up “an unlawful gathering” at the church and that Burris was lucky not to have been among the 40 people arrested.

Pasadena-Based Group

Burris, who was sent to South Africa last July by Africa Enterprise, a multiracial, ecumenical evangelical group based in Pasadena, Calif., said she has asked the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria to protest and that she intends to sue the Lebowa government but will continue her work in Seshego.

Lebowa and other tribal homelands, which have varying amounts of political autonomy from the South African government, escaped much of the early civil unrest but have been drawn into the violence increasingly in recent months as the anti-apartheid protests have spread.