Activist Blacks Boycotting White Stores in S. Africa

Anti-apartheid activists Monday launched a Christmas-season boycott of white-owned businesses around Johannesburg.

The boycott is intended to protest the nearly six-month-old state of emergency in South Africa and to call for Soweto and other nearby black townships to be merged with Johannesburg and governed by a single, multiracial council.

In addition to white-owned stores, businesses owned by members of the Soweto town council also are targeted by the blacks’ boycott. The council is viewed by militants as a collaborator with the white-led government’s apartheid system of racial separation and minority white rule.

A spokesman for the boycott organizing committee, Jabu Ngwenya, was quoted Monday by the newspaper Business Day as saying that efforts will be made to crack down on youths who use intimidation and violence to enforce the boycott.

In the past, some black shoppers who defied boycotts have been beaten by youths or forced to swallow purchased goods such as raw meat, detergents and cooking oil.

A journalist who lives in Soweto reported that youths in some neighborhoods accosted some commuters returning from Johannesburg on Monday evening, seized goods bought in the city and destroyed them. He said he heard no reports of anyone being beaten.

The boycott is scheduled to continue through Dec. 31. It exempts patronage of drugstores and doctors’ offices.

In another protest, the country’s largest trade federation, the predominantly black Congress of South African Trade Unions, called on its members to hold a two-hour work stoppage Monday to commemorate slain activists, call for an end to the state of emergency and demand the release of detainees.

The Federated Chamber of Industries, representing most of the country’s major industrial employers, condemned the planned work stoppage, saying such protests “are inappropriate, destructive and dangerous ways of mourning the dead or pressing political demands.”

In another development, a nationwide opinion poll released Monday indicated that about 75% of urban South African blacks want apartheid ended by negotiation rather than by violence and would prefer a multiracial government to an all-black one.

Half the respondents said they believe there is still a large reservoir of good will among blacks toward whites.

The survey, conducted several weeks ago, was one of the largest polling of blacks in recent years. However, the private polling firm, Research Surveys Omnichek, said only 598 of the 1,300 blacks that it approached were willing to answer political questions.

Several questions were asked only of the 296 men who participated in the survey.

Of the men, 84% said they believe they might might lose their jobs because of sanctions against South Africa, but 43% said they would willingly pay that price as part of the fight against apartheid.