5 S. Africa Blacks Reported Dead in Police Clash

Five blacks were reported Thursday to have been killed in a two-hour battle with police as they resisted apparent attempts to evict them from their homes in Soweto, the sprawling black city outside Johannesburg.

An 11-year-old schoolboy was shot to death and five others were wounded in a separate incident when uniformed white men, riding a bus owned by a company being boycotted by Soweto commuters, opened fire with shotguns on the children, according to local residents.

The government’s Bureau for Information, the only authorized source of news on South Africa’s continuing civil unrest, said it could confirm only four deaths in the two incidents, which took place Wednesday evening, but local sources put the toll higher. The violence was the worst in Soweto after several weeks of relative calm there.

White Woman Sentenced

Elsewhere, a 28-year-old white woman, Marion M. Sparg, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on treason and arson charges for planting bombs in police stations on behalf of black nationalist guerrillas.

Most residents of Soweto have refused to pay rent or utility charges for more than five months. Young men in the Orlando West section of Soweto, anticipating attempts to evict them, had gathered Wednesday night in “defense units” organized by local street committees, according to residents, and attacked police when they entered the neighborhood about 9 p.m.

Police shot and killed one man after opening fire with shotguns to disperse a crowd that had begun to stone them, the Bureau for Information said. Two other men were fatally wounded, according to the bureau, when policemen fired on another mob of more than 100 people hurling firebombs at them.

20 Taken to Hospital

But local physicians put the death toll at five, and witnesses said they had seen at least eight people killed. Twenty wounded were taken to Soweto’s Baragwanath Hospital, and more were treated at local clinics.

“The gunfire went on for almost two hours,” said Albertina Sisulu, co-president of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of 700 anti-apartheid groups, who lives in the neighborhood. “It was chaotic, like having a little war in your backyard. . . . People couldn’t sleep, and parents, of course, went out frantically searching for their children.”

The Soweto City Council declared at an emergency meeting Thursday that although eviction notices are being issued to people who refuse to pay rent, there is no plan to enforce them.

The incident seemed to be almost a replay of an Aug. 27 clash between the police and residents of Soweto’s White City neighborhood, where more than 20 were killed, again in a reported attempt by municipal police to evict from government-owned housing people taking part in the rent strike.

The circumstances of one death, that of Bongani Thomas Kheswa, 11, on one of Soweto’s main thoroughfares, were not clear, the Bureau for Information said. The bureau confirmed the death only after being questioned by local newspapers.

Friends of Kheswa said that he and other youths had been gunned down by white men, apparently guards riding an otherwise empty commuter bus that had passed up and down the street several times. They said the shooting was unprovoked.

The boys were in costume and were begging coins from passing motorists in observance of Guy Fawkes Day, an English holiday marking Fawkes’ attempt, in 1605, to blow up the British Parliament. In some neighborhoods here, as in England, the day is observed by burning Fawkes in effigy and by children asking passers-by for “a penny for the Guy.”

“Some other boys had been throwing stones, and many were playing Guy Fawkes,” said Xoliswa Sampi, 15, one of those who was wounded. “Whites in green uniforms opened fire, and I was hit.”

Kheswa died of shotgun wounds on the side of his head, in his back and chest, according to his father, who found the boy’s body at a gas station after friends brought word of the shooting.

The Bureau for Information said the police had not been operating in the area at the time of the shooting and that an investigation had begun into the incident. The bus company denied any involvement.

In a Johannesburg courtroom, Sparg was sentenced to 25 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of treason and arson. She is a member of the African National Congress’ underground military wing, Spear of the Nation.

Justice P.J. van der Walt, describing Sparg as “a dedicated Marxist and revolutionary,” told her that “the fact that as a white South African, you chose to espouse the cause of revolution I regard as an aggravating feature.” He said he hoped that the long sentence would deter other whites from joining the ANC.

Sparg, a former journalist, had confessed to planting bombs in three police stations this year. She said she had done so as “a soldier and a patriot” attempting to bring down the country’s white-led minority government. Two of the bombs exploded, injuring several people and causing considerable damage. The third was found before it exploded. Sparg also confessed to throwing firebombs at offices of the white opposition Progressive Federal Party five years ago.

In Port Elizabeth, General Motors Corp. called in the police to remove about 500 striking workers who had been occupying the firm’s plants for the past week to protest its failure to consult them on terms for the sale of its South African subsidiary to local managers and its refusal to pay them any severance or establish a pension fund.

Robert White, GM’s local managing director, said the company “could not allow a situation of employees who had been dismissed to illegally occupy the plant,” nor allow them to “maltreat” other employees attempting to report for work despite the wildcat strike.

But Freddie Sauls, national secretary of the National Automobile and Allied Workers’ Union, said that although the police had used no force in evicting the strikers, “we were shocked by GM’s action.”

“Instead of trying to solve problems around the negotiating table,” he said, “they resorted to calling in the South African police . . . and this is unacceptable.”

With the strikers removed, White said the plant would resume production today, but Sauls said that union members planned a meeting to discuss the situation and a plan to submit their demands to arbitration.