50,000 Blacks Hold S. Africa Rites : Others Shut Down Port Elizabeth With Memorial Strike

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — About 50,000 mourners attended an anti-apartheid memorial ceremony today in a black township in Cape province, and a strike brought Port Elizabeth to a near standstill as blacks remembered their dead.

The mourners gathered at a stadium near Langa township in memory of 20 blacks killed by police gunfire at a funeral a year ago.

Meanwhile, witnesses said police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at a crowd in Sharpeville--near Johannesburg--marching to the graves of 69 blacks killed by police in a 1960 demonstration that became known as the Sharpeville Massacre. Witnesses said one person was injured.

The police later withdrew and about 800 youths regrouped to tend the graves. They then marched through the streets chanting, “We’ll shoot the Boers (Afrikaner farmers), the guns will solve the problem.”

In the black township of Kroonstad, also near Johannesburg, police clashed with 10,000 mourners at the funeral of a 10-year-old boy shot dead by a black man, reporters said. A 20-year-old man was hospitalized after being hit by birdshot, and another man was injured from whippings, reporters said.

The daylong Langa ceremonies went peacefully except for one incident in which riot squads fired tear gas at about 400 mourners waiting for buses to the stadium, witnesses said.

The shootings last year provoked worldwide outrage, distressed white South African liberals and forced the government to order a judicial inquiry that revealed serious police misjudgments.

More than 600,000 blacks went on strike to mark the anniversary of the Langa shootings, leaving Uitenhage and the main eastern Cape province city of Port Elizabeth largely deserted. Many shops closed for the day because workers did not show up and there were no black customers.

In Johannesburg and Durban, several hundred black demonstrators spilled into white city centers from nearby townships, a rare phenomenon in a country whose 18 months of unrest has been largely confined to black townships. The blacks were marching in memory of the Sharpeville and Langa victims.

Police with whips and tear gas broke up the protest in Durban, while in Johannesburg the demonstrators were chased through the streets before being allowed to gather for anti-apartheid speeches.

Thirteen blacks were reported killed in separate incidents Thursday and today, most of them involving fighting among blacks.