Fighting Reported in Tribal Homeland

Fighting has resumed in the small South African tribal homeland of Kwandebele between factions supporting the territory’s proposed “independence” from Pretoria and those opposed to the plan, according to fragmented accounts from the region Friday.

The Ndebeles’ paramount chief, Mabhogo David Mahlangu, who rules four-fifths of the homeland under tribal law, narrowly escaped death, according to the reports, when the Ndzundza clan’s royal village was raided this week by heavily armed men who arrived in a convoy of 11 cars in what appeared to be an assassination attempt.

Two of Mahlangu’s sons have been detained by the police as opponents of Kwandebele’s independence from South Africa, and a third son, Crown Prince Cornelius Mahlangu, a former Kwandebele minister, emerged briefly from hiding to help rescue his father from the gunmen’s attack and to take him to safety near Johannesburg.

Catholic missionaries and medical workers said they believe that about 12 people and possibly more were killed, but police headquarters in Pretoria said it had no record of any “unrest-related” deaths in the area.

More than 20 schools, stores and government buildings have reportedly been set afire in the week and a half since the Kwandebele legislative assembly decided to declare the region’s independence from Pretoria, reversing an earlier decision, after ousting the key opponents of the plan.

Helen Suzman, the opposition Progressive Federal Party’s spokesman on black affairs and on law and order, said in Cape Town that she had received reports of considerable fighting and numerous arson attacks in the past week and of widespread arrests by the police.

These and other reports of widespread clashes between the police, whose numbers apparently have been augmented by about 150 deputized members of the conservative Imbokhotho vigilantes, could not be readily confirmed. Telephone links to the region were cut, and government officials in Pretoria professed to have no knowledge of developments in Kwandebele, about 90 miles northeast of here.

But Brigadier Hertzog Lerm, the regional police commander, said the police had detained about 70 political activists in the past 10 days. He warned that attempts to rekindle strong opposition to independence would fail.

“We are too strong,” Lerm told the independent South African Press Assn. from Siyabuswa, the territory’s capital. He denied that there had been a major resurgence of unrest, but acknowledged a series of police raids on the homes of opposition leaders since Monday.

Kwandebele would be the fifth tribal homeland to get nominal independence from the white-led minority government in Pretoria under an old apartheid policy of confining blacks to rural areas and then excising those territories from South Africa. But none of the others--Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Transkei and Venda--has won international recognition.

Kwandebele, an impoverished scattering of about 40 sun-scorched villages over an area of 890 square miles, lacks natural resources and industry, but it has a population of more than 400,000.