Mourning 21 Slain Blacks, Tutu Declares, ‘We Will Be Free’

Bishop Desmond Tutu, tears in his eyes, his voice an anguished whisper, on Sunday mourned the 21 blacks slain here in political violence last week but then assured a church congregation, “The God of love is going to make us free!”

“The souls of those killed cry out, ‘How long, Lord, is this going to continue?’ ” he told the churchgoers, mostly black residents of Soweto but joined by some sympathetic whites. “The answer is: The time is not yet right. Some more of you, sisters and brothers, will still be killed.

“Freedom will not be cheap. The price we have paid is already heavy, and we are being called on to pay in yet more lives. But, despite all that the powers of the world may do, we are going to be free!”

Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner, was bringing his message of hope and love to the angry residents of White City, an impoverished section of Soweto, the black satellite city of nearly 2 million people southwest of Johannesburg, where police killed 20 blacks, including half a dozen schoolchildren, and wounded at least 100 in a night of street fighting last Tuesday.

The other fatality was a member of the Soweto city council who was hacked to death by residents angered by the fatal shooting of a youth by guards at his house. City Press, a semiweekly newspaper serving black readers, reported Sunday that all but one of the 28 current members of Soweto’s city council have now fled to Johannesburg, taking refuge with their families in heavily guarded apartments there.

The clashes apparently stemmed from attempts by Soweto municipal officials to evict residents who have refused to pay their rent for the last three months as part of a community-wide rent strike to reduce housing and utility charges and demand action on other grievances.

Ambushes in Streets

The government has charged, however, that police patrols were ambushed at barricades set up in the streets by youths, who the government says have been trying to escalate violence in Soweto for the last three weeks to undermine “the return to law and order” under the 11-week-old state of emergency.

The fighting was the bloodiest since President Pieter W. Botha placed the country under emergency rule June 12 and gave the police and army the authority to virtually take whatever actions they believe necessary to end the country’s civil unrest, now entering its third year, with more than 2,200 dead, according to government reports.

“It is not surprising that our people ask, ‘God, tell us what we have done? What is it that makes us attract so much suffering to ourselves? What have we done that we should suffer for so long, that we should suffer in this terrible way?’ ” Tutu said, addressing the bereaved families and their neighbors at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in White City.

He recalled how he and the parish priest visited one of the mothers whose son had been killed in the fighting only to discover that a second was critically injured. “How do you tell people about the love of God at a moment like that?” he asked.

“We (blacks) suffer in a land that claims to be Christian, and we suffer at the hands of those who say they are Christians. . . . But I come to assure you of the love of God for us, and I come to tell you that God is with us.”

Calling on the deep Christian faith of most blacks here, Tutu thus turned the mourning and grief of White City into a kind of hope, replacing despair with not just optimism but the self-confident assertion that “we will be free.”

Tutu was preaching his last sermon as the Anglican bishop of Johannesburg. Next Sunday, he will be installed as archbishop of Cape Town and head of the Anglican church in southern Africa.

‘Share Your Pain’

About 50 whites joined the congregation of nearly 1,000 blacks at St. Paul’s to “share your pain,” as it was expressed by the Rev. Wolfram Kistner, a staff member of the South African Council of Churches and a former political detainee.

“We cannot come to your place as white people without saying, ‘Forgive us our trespasses,’ ” Kistner said. “We have to ask forgiveness for not having stood up with enough courage, with enough love and with sufficient knowledge of what you were experiencing.”

Among the whites were Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who advocates economic sanctions as “a means to get South Africa moving toward a solution of these problems,” and the Rev. Donald Shriver Jr., president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

“This, quite unbelievably, is the church triumphant,” Shriver said after the 2 1/2-hour service ended with multiracial chains of worshipers clasping hands and joining in a fervent chant of “Peace, peace, peace. . . . “

“There is more triumph, more hope, more faith here than I would have believed possible,” he said.

Father David Nkwe, the rector of St. Paul’s, said: “Only faith can keep hope alive through tragedies like this. . . . Without faith, we would have been consumed by anger and hatred long ago.

“White City is not a large community, and to have 20 people or more killed in a night is truly horrific. Not only must individual families come to terms with their losses but the community must as well. This is a very deep and grievous wound.”

According to Nkwe, local clergymen are planning a mass funeral in Soweto on Thursday for those killed by the police--residents put the number of dead at 30, not the 20 officially reported--despite severe restrictions on funerals of unrest victims to prevent them from turning into anti-government rallies.

“If the government stops us, then let the world know they have stopped us from burying our dead with care and love, with dignity and respect,” Nkwe said. “They should know, too, that they will be adding to the people’s anger.”