S. Africa Marks a Grim Anniversary Today : Killing of 14 Blacks in Vaal Region Precipitated 2 Years of Violence

When the trouble began, about mid-morning on Sept. 3 two years ago, Samuel Mnisi sent his grandson Wiseman home to his mother at the other end of town, which was still quiet.

The boy, who was 9, never arrived. He was shot on the way by the police.

“The police said he threw a stone at them,” Mnisi recalled. “I don’t believe it. But they shot him. In the back. Eleven times. We counted the holes. The bullets--real bullets, not birdshot--came out through his tummy. We tried to get him to the hospital, but he died on the way.”

Blind Grandfather’s Guide

Wiseman Mnisi, a bright boy who had been his blind grandfather’s guide around town, was one of 14 blacks killed in Sebokeng, Sharpeville and the other black ghettos of the Vaal industrial region on Sept. 3, 1984, the start of two years of unremitting political violence. More than 2,200 people, most of them black, have died since.

“The Vaal was like an erupting volcano then,” Ike Bikitsha, a local businessman, said here recently. “It has covered the whole country with its fiery lava, and the Vaal volcano is still rumbling away. . . . “The people’s anger has been building up for a long, long time, and these explosions are inevitable. There are issues of the moment--like the rent increases two years ago--but the real cause is apartheid. As long as apartheid continues, there will be no peace. We blacks want our country back, and we will struggle and fight until it is ours.”

Rent Hikes Sparked Strife

The trouble in the Vaal region began when the Lekoa Town Council, which administers Sebokeng, Sharpeville and four neighboring black townships with a total population of about 350,000, raised local rents and utility charges, ignoring residents’ objections that with a deepening recession and growing unemployment, they could not afford the increases.

On Sept. 3, workers and students stayed home to protest the increases and to demand that rents be reduced. When the police prevented residents from holding planned meetings at local churches, firing tear gas to disperse some of the groups, angry crowds poured into the townships’ streets. Police patrols were stoned, and they fired back with tear gas grenades, rubber bullets, shotguns and eventually rifles.

The rioting continued for a week in the Vaal region, about 60 miles south of Johannesburg. According to the police, 30 blacks were killed that week, but local clergymen, who buried the dead, put the total at 70. Many more--local leaders say about 150--were killed here over the next three months as the police, backed by as many as 7,000 soldiers, struggled to restore order.

Engulfed Black Ghettos

The unrest spread like “fiery lava,” as Bikitsha put it, and quickly engulfed the black ghettos around Johannesburg, including Soweto. Thousands of black youths, angry over the poor schooling they receive and the lack of job opportunities afterward, became the shock troops of the renewed black struggle against apartheid.

Within a year, few areas of the country, even its rural hinterland, remained unaffected, and in proclaiming a national state of emergency on June 12 this year, the government acknowledged that civil unrest had reached a “very, very dangerous level.” Its continued escalation, the government said, could threaten “the very security of the state.”

Violence and counterviolence have, in fact, acquired a sort of political legitimacy in South Africa over the last two years.

More Prone to Violence

Blacks, increasingly radical, have become more willing to use violence to overthrow white rule and to attack other blacks they see as collaborating with the regime. The government, supported by most whites, has tried promises of more reforms to reduce black unrest, but then returned to the “iron fist” that had brought previous civil disorders to an end here.

As the violence has grown, so has the despair of many South Africans, blacks and whites alike.

“There just doesn’t seem to be a way out,” said Ethel Litau, whose husband, Lazarus, the chairman of the Vaal Civic Assn., was detained without charge in May and has not been released. “At first, I thought this would all come right, but in two years there have been no real changes, only more deaths. I have lost hope.”

The severe measures ordered by President Pieter W. Botha in June have succeeded, the government contends, in reducing the violence to the lowest levels of the last two years in most of the country.

Political Costs High

But the political and economic costs of the government’s crackdown have been high.

Under the state of emergency, Botha gave the police and army authority to take virtually any action they believed necessary to quell the violence. Police have now detained without charge more than 12,000 people, according to human rights groups here, and are continuing to hold hundreds of black community leaders without whom little progress has been made in ending black school boycotts, consumer boycotts, rent strikes and other protests.

Liberal whites accuse Botha of effectively suspending many basic civil liberties and all but ending parliamentary government.

Economy Lagging

Business confidence remains low. Capital flight and emigration have surged, and foreign companies have either halted new investment or are withdrawing entirely from South Africa. After two years of reduced output, the economy may grow 1% this year, but that still means lower per capita income--less money for almost everyone. Stronger international economic sanctions became inevitable with the state of emergency, and they seem certain to accelerate these trends.

Two years after the first violent anti-government protests, Sebokeng, Sharpeville and the other Vaal townships remain restless, and in many ways they reflect recent developments in black communities across South Africa.

“If you look at the Vaal today, it may seem quiet compared to the last four months of 1984,” Father Edward Lennon, pastor of Emmanuel Catholic Church here, commented, “but this is very deceptive. The state has shown it can impose a semblance of law and order on a township like Sebokeng, although it requires almost military occupation to do it.

Sees Problems Growing

“But the state has not been able to resolve any of the problems here, and they have grown and grown. The rent strike that began two years ago continues, for example, and the government is now evicting some families. There will be trouble over that, perhaps serious trouble. The school boycott continues, and now there is talk of closing the schools if the kids don’t come stay in class. And there will be trouble over that. The town council is still in office, although the community has completely repudiated it. Unemployment has increased, the housing problem is no better--well, I could go on and on. . . . The bitterness that is being stored up in this way is certain to explode, and again and again, until the problems are resolved.”

Bikitsha sees the country moving perceptibly into what he calls “a Beirut situation where people say, ‘To hell with talking, I’m starting my own army,’ and then use violence to gain political recognition.”

To Sebokeng’s residents, the origins of the violence on Sept. 3, 1984, are clear, and rooted in the apartheid system.

Rents and utility charges for the government-owned houses had been repeatedly raised without any apparent improvement in services. In dollars the amounts do not seem high, a 10% increase on perhaps $60 a month, but for most families here housing costs take a quarter of the husband’s pay, if he’s working. With unemployment about 25% and inflation nearly 20%, the increases weighed heavily.

Monthly Pension $31.20

Samuel Mnisi, 57, for example, gets a government disability pension of about $31.20 a month. Blinded in one eye when splattered with hot grease in an industrial accident 13 years ago, he lost sight in his other eye when surgeons mistakenly operated on it while trying to treat the injury. He survives on money from his children and by selling beer from his back door. He says he cannot find the money for higher rent and utility charges.

“We are poor, poor people,” he said, “but this government just keeps taking and taking and taking from us. That’s why people got so angry two years ago, and why they are still angry now.”

Botha contends--and his government is seeking to prove in a lengthy treason trial of national and Vaal regional anti-apartheid activists--that the outbreak of violence in Sebokeng and Sharpeville was part of a “revolutionary onslaught” to overthrow the government.

“The government says it was all part of a conspiracy to launch a revolution and that we are all Communists,” said Philip Phatang, owner of a local butcher shop. “That’s crazy, really crazy. What we are is Christians demanding justice. . . .

Blames Greed, Stupidity

“What happened here in the Vaal, and is still happening, was due to the white man’s greed--wanting it all for himself, leaving nothing for us--and to his stupidity in not seeing what was coming and doing things to ease the people’s anger over the rent increases and prevent the explosion. . . . “

But the second reason for the violence--repudiation of the Lekoa Town Council, whose members were elected by no more than 9% of the adult residents--was equally important to Sebokeng residents.

“These so-called town councillors who voted for this increase are supposed to be our elected representatives, and the council is supposed to be our first little step toward democracy, what the government now likes to call ‘power-sharing,’ ” said a Sebokeng resident, a business consultant, who asked not to be quoted by name. “But the council is a sham, and these guys are all sellouts, trying to make as many bucks as they can by saying, ‘Yes, boss; yes, boss; yes, boss.’ ”

Of those killed on Sept. 3, three were members of the Lekoa Town Council. The houses of black policemen were burned as well, and their families driven from the township.

Blacks Attack Blacks

Black attacks on other blacks, often against people perceived by the community as government collaborators but sometimes political rivals, have become so much a part of the pattern of violence over the past two years that the government says they have accounted for about two-thirds of the unrest deaths in the country.

“When the government talks about this ‘black-on-black violence,’ ” a local social worker said, asking not to be quoted by name, “it is trying to disguise the real cause of the violence, and that’s apartheid. . . .

“We must also admit honestly, however, that the black community is divided and fighting among itself. Our people are not united, and the political and ideological rivalries of various groups have cost us heavily, both in lives and in progress.”

The Vaal townships are perhaps less organized than most urban black areas. Dozens of community leaders have been detained, often for months at a time, without charge under the country’s security laws. As a result of four different trials of Vaal residents on charges of murder, treason and subversion, local affiliates of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of anti-apartheid groups, and the black consciousness Azanian People’s Organization are weak. Street committees, increasingly the backbone of the anti-apartheid movement, have been organized in less than 40% of the neighborhoods.

‘Reformist’ Constitution

Sept. 3, 1984, was coincidentally the day that the Botha government put a new “reformist” constitution into effect. It brought Coloreds, as persons of mixed-race are officially described here, and Indians into a new, racially segregated, tricameral Parliament but continued to exclude the country’s 25 million blacks, the majority, from national power.

“For many people, this was the final disillusionment,” a Sharpeville activist said, “because it became clear, once and for all, that the path of reform would never bring us to power. Those who thought the white man was somehow going to turn things over to us could now see that everything the government is doing is to preserve its power. . . .

“So, suddenly, political reform, talks, negotiations, all those soft options, fell away, and there we were facing hard choices about how to bring this regime down.”