Soweto ‘Iron Lady’ Target of White Suburb Bombing

A bomb blast rocked a whites-only suburb today in what appeared to be a revenge attack against the “Iron Lady of Soweto,” a housing official hated and feared by blacks in the huge township of Soweto.

The government said the bomb went off before dawn in Johannesburg’s Craighall Park district, a plush area where blacks may not live under apartheid.

It was the first time in more than two years of anti-apartheid unrest that a bomb attack has occurred in a white suburb.

The explosion caused extensive damage but no casualties.

The target was Del Kevan, director of housing in nearby Soweto, where her attempts to quell an anti-government rent boycott last month ended with at least 21 residents dead.

Kevan, called the “Iron Lady of Soweto” by black ghetto residents, said she was sure that the attack was connected to her job. She said she has received death threats over her work.

Rent boycotts in townships south of Johannesburg spurred anti-apartheid unrest in 1984 and have spread as a method of protesting what many blacks consider to be substandard housing and public services.

Kevan said in an interview last month with The Sowetan, a white-owned daily newspaper for blacks, that she believed evictions were a way to resolve rent boycotts. She said she did not enjoy evicting people but that evictions would force them to pay rent.

“I am afraid that there is nothing for nothing and very little for 10 cents,” she was quoted as saying.