Blacks Praise Communists at S. African Rites

More than 20,000 blacks, defying government bans on political meetings, gathered Monday in Port Elizabeth for a memorial service for a South African Communist Party leader. It was the boldest display yet of growing black support for the outlawed Communists.

Shouting “Long live the South African Communist Party!” and “Viva Marx! Viva Lenin! Viva communism!” young black militants underscored the party’s attraction for those fighting apartheid.

Moses Mabhida, 62, the party’s secretary general who died of a heart attack last month in Mozambique after 25 years in exile, was praised as “a fallen hero of the people” and as a new figure in “the pantheon of blacks” who have died over the past two years in the struggle against racial discrimination and white-minority government here.

Restrictions Imposed

Mabhida, who was also a member of the outlawed African National Congress’ executive committee, was to have been buried at Pietermaritzburg in a funeral that might have drawn as many as 100,000 blacks from around the country.

But the government, after initially agreeing, imposed severe restrictions, allowing only family members and close friends to attend and placing the service under supervision of the security police to prevent its becoming a full-scale rally against apartheid.

Mabhida’s family rejected those conditions. He was then given a state funeral Saturday in Maputo, the capital of neighboring Mozambique, and the United Democratic Front, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups, organized Monday’s memorial service in Port Elizabeth.

Lechesa Tsenoli, a Natal provincial official of the United Democratic Front, said that a Mabhida funeral in this country had been foreseen “as the largest gathering yet in the struggle.”

“To many blacks, that Moses Mabhida was a Communist was a further badge of honor, not the crime the government wanted to make it,” Tsenoli said in Durban. “He was not a man from Moscow, but a man from Natal who fought his whole life for his people.”

Red Communist flags bearing the yellow hammer and sickle were raised by the dozen at a sports stadium in Zwide, a black township outside Port Elizabeth on South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast. Placards praised the South African Communist Party and that of the Soviet Union.

That kind of open identification with the Communist Party here was a rare sight a year ago. The party has been outlawed for more than 35 years, and furthering the aims of communism is a crime akin to treason under South African law.

Although party members continued to hold key posts in the African National Congress and the latter’s military wing, Spear of the Nation, the party’s internal organization was decimated in the 1960s by a government campaign against it.

Red Flags Now Common

But Communist Party flags and banners, unseen until about eight months ago, are now carried at virtually all funerals of blacks killed in the country’s civil unrest. Communist slogans are heard at most black political rallies, and many black radicals speak openly of the party as one of the strongest elements in the anti-apartheid alliance.

“Our struggle is one, and our goals are the same,” Mkhuseli Jack, president of the Port Elizabeth Youth Congress, said of the “time-tested alliance” with the South African Communist Party. “Their support has never wavered, their commitment is not to be doubted. . . . Of who else can this be said?”

Henry Fazzie, regional vice president of the United Democratic Front in eastern Cape province, said that the United States should reassess its relations with South Africa, particularly the policy of constructive engagement, “before it is too late.”

“Does the Reagan Administration really believe that we will be interested in friendly relations with America after it has done everything it could to keep this racist regime in power in Pretoria?” Fazzie asked. “If it harbors such delusions, then let these red flags be a warning to it.”

Store Boycott to Resume

Jack, who helped organize a successful black boycott of white merchants in the Port Elizabeth area last year, said the boycott will be resumed shortly in an effort to force major concessions from the government.

“We are going to boycott until they come to speak to us on a man-to-man basis,” Jack declared. “The only thing now is to boycott the Boers (Dutch-descended Afrikaners who hold political power) until they all starve to death. The boycott is the only language they understand.”

White South Africans must understand, Jack said, that “we are going to use anything in our power to get the type of society we want . . . and they have the choice of either being with us or against us, but they should realize we will not be stopped until we have succeeded.”

Jack, who like Fazzie was recently freed by court action from government orders barring him from all political activities and placing him under virtual house arrest, suggested he and other black political leaders in Port Elizabeth were about to go underground again to avoid arrest.

“Brothers and sisters, this could be the last time that we meet here and also the last time that I speak before you, as the government is bent on banning people and getting away with it easily,” Jack said.