S. Africa Clerics, Marchers Pray for Detainees’ Release

Anglican and Catholic bishops led a dawn procession of 600 worshipers, many carrying wooden crosses, through downtown Durban on Friday to pray for the release of South Africa’s thousands of political detainees.

The multiracial procession, led by Catholic Archbishop Denis E. Hurley and Anglican Bishop Michael Nuttall and joined by Methodist, Lutheran and other clergymen, was intended to demonstrate the church’s opposition to the government’s practice of imprisoning many of its opponents without trial.

The procession, marking Good Friday on the Christian calendar, was also meant as a further church challenge to new police orders prohibiting any campaign or organized call for the release of political detainees.

A special ecumenical service, led by Hurley, concluded with a prayer for the detainees. It said in part: “Be especially today with the children in confinement. . . . Give us your power to break their chains and open the gates of freedom.”

Jesus’ Role Recalled

A religious pamphlet, handed out at the prayer service, contained a section entitled, “Jesus Was a Detainee.”

As Hurley, Nuttall and other church leaders carried a 6 1/2-foot wooden cross along the mile-long route of the procession, other clergymen and worshipers, including relatives of political detainees, carried 60 smaller crosses--each representing a child believed to be held in Durban under the 10-month-old state of emergency.

In Cape Town, the Rev. Allan Boesak, a prominent anti-apartheid activist and moderator of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, conducted a special service for detainees and then handed out bumper stickers that, with a biblical quotation, called for solidarity with political prisoners.

“Remember those who are in prison as though you were in prison with them,” the bumper sticker says, quoting St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews.

The political prisoners, some of whom have been held without charge since last June, were remembered at other Good Friday services in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, East London and Pietermaritzburg as church leaders confronted the government on what they see as a fundamental issue of freedom of religious belief as well as political expression.

A week ago, Gen. Johan Coetzee, the national police commissioner, used his powers under the state of emergency, which give the police and army virtual martial-law authority, to prohibit all demonstrations and other actions demanding the release of political detainees.

After angry protests here and abroad, Coetzee relented and said the regulations would not apply to religious activities and to the current election campaign. But the protests continue to grow, threatening the government with active civil disobedience and a major crisis between church and state.

Clergymen Defied Rule

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and 46 other Anglican clergymen on Thursday wrote President Pieter W. Botha asking, in apparent defiance of the new regulations, that he either free the detainees, believed to number about 7,800 at present, or bring them to trial.

“With respect, sir, we believe that the valid response that law-abiding citizens should make to these regulations is openly to disobey them, as we are doing now,” the clergymen wrote in their letter. “We do so deliberately and consciously, out of Christian conscience.”

Tutu and Boesak had earlier held a prayer service in St. George’s Anglican Cathedral in Cape Town in deliberate defiance of the regulations, embarrassing the government at a politically sensitive time with whites-only parliamentary elections scheduled for May 6.

In Pretoria, meanwhile, the government’s Bureau for Information said in its daily report on the continuing civil unrest that a mob of 50 “black radicals” had killed an 18-year-old black in the black township of Kwadengezi, outside Durban. Police arrested nine men. A smaller group later threw 10 firebombs at a house in the township, setting it on fire and injuring its owners.