‘Horrified’ Dignitaries Go With Tutu to Shantytown

Desmond Tutu, the newly installed leader of the Anglican Church in southern Africa, today led the Archbishop of Canterbury and other dignitaries through the mud and shacks of one of South Africa’s worst shantytowns.

“I’ve been horrified to walk through the dirt and squalor and smell and flies,” Robert K. Runcie, spiritual leader of the 74 million Anglicans worldwide, told reporters after visiting squatter families in their Crossroads shacks of cardboard and corrugated metal.

“This is something I feel has got to change.”

Tutu, installed Sunday as Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, told Runcie of the factional fighting at Crossroads earlier this year that killed scores of people and left about 70,000 black squatters burned out of their homes.

“The root cause of all the problems we have had here is apartheid,” Tutu told Runcie as they looked out over one of the bulldozed fields where thousands of people had lived.

Segregated Society

Apartheid establishes a racially segregated society in which the 24-million-black majority has no vote in national affairs.

Tutu later showed the Crossroads area to Coretta Scott King, widow of the American civil rights leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He pointed out the razor-wire fence around the barren area, comparing it to the Berlin Wall. “The police patrol it to stop the people coming back,” Tutu said.

Tutu helped negotiate a cease-fire in June between the rival factions--one led by anti-apartheid militants and the other by conservative vigilantes who burned down their rivals’ neighborhoods.

Tutu and many others have suggested that security forces allowed the massive destruction of homes because it fit the government’s efforts to relocate many Crossroads squatters at a new settlement farther from Cape Town.

“People agreed they were not each other’s enemies,” Tutu said of the peace talks he led. “They agreed the real enemy is the system.”

Armored Patrols

Runcie said he was struck by the large number of military armored vehicles patrolling the area.

“You’re not going to solve problems at this scale unless the whole community works together,” he said. “The whole atmosphere--the armored vehicles, the barbed wire--says this is not a community working together.”

Runcie described Crossroads as “a brewing place for further trouble” and said the conditions are “dramatically more dreary than I expected.”

At the end of the visit, Runcie and Tutu stopped at a 5-year-old wooden Anglican church where they knelt side by side in prayer.

In Pretoria, officials said four black men armed with Soviet-made weapons were shot and killed by police in the eastern port of Durban on Sunday night; they declined to give details of the clash.