Home of White S. Africa Official Bombed

A bomb exploded before dawn Wednesday at the home of a white official who is trying to evict tens of thousands of tenants who are conducting a rent strike in the black ghetto of Soweto outside Johannesburg.

Del Kevan, Soweto’s housing director, said that no one was injured in the 3:30 a.m. explosion but that her home in one of Johannesburg’s plushest whites-only suburbs was badly damaged.

The attack, carried out with a Soviet-made limpet mine commonly used by guerrillas of the African National Congress, was the first against the residence of a white official since the current civil unrest began here two years ago.

South African authorities, warned nearly a year ago by the African National Congress that blacks would soon take their “struggle” against apartheid into white areas, expressed serious concern that similar attacks might follow in a sharp escalation of the conflict here.

‘Iron Lady of Soweto’

Dubbed the “Iron Lady of Soweto” by its nearly 2 million residents, Kevan said she had received several death threats after ordering the first evictions of rent strikers last month. She has had a bodyguard at work, and her home had been placed under police protection.

The explosion knocked down her chimney and blew large holes in the roof of her house; walls were cracked and scorched, windows shattered and doors blown off their hinges.

“I have not had a chance at this stage to think about my position, and I can’t say what I will do or whether I will continue,” Kevan said outside her house.

In Soweto, Kevan is widely blamed for the deaths of about 30 blacks killed in street fighting with the police four weeks ago. Those clashes began with neighborhood meetings to discuss rumored evictions and grew when police said they had been ambushed with hand grenades and then opened fire with pistols, shotguns and rifles.

“There is nothing for nothing,” Kevan had told the local Sowetan newspaper last month, warning that rent strikers would be evicted. “I am going to evict the incorrigibles, and having made arrangements for the other people to pay, I think that they will pay.”

The rent strike, begun two years ago to protest high housing costs but now one of the principal anti-government campaigns, continues in Soweto and 45 other black communities around the country, according to government officials. The United Democratic Front and other anti-apartheid groups are attempting to build it into an even larger effort at civil disobedience.

Rising black anger was also reflected Wednesday in a memorial service for 177 miners, all but five of them black, who were killed last week when a fire filled the shafts and tunnels at a gold mine east of Johannesburg with poisonous gas.

Winnie Mandela, the black nationalist leader, told 5,000 black miners at the service near the Kinross Gold Mine at Evander: “The moment you stop digging their gold, their diamonds, that’s the moment we shall be free. You dig the wealth--and you hold that golden key to our liberation.”

Mandela, the wife of Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned African National Congress leader, noted plans for a one-day strike by miners throughout the country next Wednesday and suggested that bigger protests are being planned.

“There may very well come a time when your leaders will ask you for greater sacrifices than a one-day strike,” she said, “because you are digging the wealth that lets the police sit on those Casspirs (armored police vehicles) and continue our oppression. The time for speeches that land on deaf ears in Pretoria has come to an end. . . . The time for talking has gone.”

Officials of the all-black National Union of Mineworkers sounded similar notes of militancy.

“The government of this land has declared war,” said James Molatsi, the union president. “We accept war, and it will be fought by each and every one of us. There are some of you who will say you don’t want to die. Do you not want to die fighting? Or are you going to die digging out the gold of the men who will end up shooting you?”

Cyril Ramaphosa, the union’s general secretary, told the miners: “The time has come now when we as workers have to take control of all the mines in the country. That way we will make sure that our brother miners don’t fall in accidents like the one at Kinross.”