9 S. Africans Convicted in First of ‘Black on Black’ Killings

Nine blacks were convicted of murder Thursday in the death two years ago of a young woman who was beaten, stoned, doused with gasoline and set on fire as a suspected police informer in one of the first of more than 500 such “black on black” killings.

Justice Wilhelm J. Hartzenberg found that despite a “crowd psychology” among the mob that killed the young woman, the nine defendants, who included a 15-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy, must have realized that they were murdering her.

But Hartzenberg acquitted two other defendants. He and two lay assessors found after a three-month trial in the Pretoria provincial Supreme Court that there was no conclusive evidence that the two were present when the woman, a 24-year-old factory worker named Maki Skosana, was killed on July 20, 1985, at Duduza, a black ghetto of 40,000 people about 30 miles east of Johannesburg.

The Skosana killing, which came after funerals for four earlier victims of South Africa’s unrest, was filmed by foreign television crews and shown widely, here and abroad, as President Pieter W. Botha imposed South Africa’s first state of emergency in 25 years.

For many, the brutality summed up both the growing anger of militant black youths, who were ready to take the life of a woman they considered a traitor, and the potential for black rebellion that faced South Africa’s white-led minority government.

But Skosana, according to her family and friends, was not a police informer. They described her as a strong supporter of the United Democratic Front, a multiracial coalition of anti-apartheid groups, and a member of the Duduza Youth Congress, one of its affiliates.

She knew of the rumors that she was a collaborator, her mother and sister said after her death, but she ignored her family’s pleas to flee, even for the sake of her son, who is now 7 years old.

Beaten, Kicked, Burned

“If they kill me, they kill me,” she told her older sister Evelyn on the day of the funerals, “but I won’t run and I won’t leave my home or my community. I am innocent, I have done no wrong, I am not a police informer, I am not a traitor to my people.”

She had no chance to answer the accusations against her, however, as a mob of 500 chased her across a field, beat her with clubs, knocked her to the ground and kicked her until she was half-conscious. They tore off half her clothes, pinned her down with a large rock on her chest, doused her with gasoline and set her on fire. As she writhed in pain, the mob danced around her and chanted, “Death to traitors! Death to traitors!”

All nine of those convicted could be seen clearly in a videotape made for television, Hartzenberg said, and several of the defendants admitted in court that they had beaten, kicked or stoned Skosana, believing her to be a police informer.

Duduza, although quiet now, was one of the hottest of the many black townships around Johannesburg two years ago. Black policemen and local officials were burned out of their homes and condemned as government collaborators blind to the township’s poverty and wretched living conditions.

Right-wing vigilantes, in turn, had attacked the young militants. Eight youths were killed and seven maimed in abortive attacks with short-fused hand grenades, which were widely blamed on police provocateurs. Other residents were killed in a subsequent police crackdown.

Defense attorneys hope to raise these and other issues next week when they argue for clemency against possible death sentences for most of the nine who were convicted.

The trial is one of more than 40 major cases involving charges of treason, terrorism, sedition, murder and arson arising out of police investigations of the past three years of political violence and civil unrest.

Meanwhile, 45 political detainees, held without charge under the current state of emergency, have begun a hunger strike in what they described as a “life or death” protest against their “long months of pain and suffering” and to demand their immediate release.

Many of the strikers are prominent anti-apartheid activists who are starting their second year in detention, according to a spokeswoman for the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, and they want to remind the world that despite the release of more than 1,000 detainees last week, about 2,000 others are still held.

A spokesman for the prisons department said that the strikers, at Modderbee Prison, east of Johannesburg, have refused to eat since Tuesday. He said their meals are being provided regularly and that the strike is “a carefully orchestrated attempt to gain public sympathy.”

Some detainees, who were originally reported by their lawyers to have been freed last week, were in fact held under new orders and never left prison, the spokeswoman said. Among those still held, contrary to earlier reports, are Zoli Malindi, Trevor Manuel and Christmas Tinto, all officials of the United Democratic Front in Cape Town.

One of those who was released, Father Smangaliso Mkhwatsha, 47, general secretary of the Southern Africa Catholic Bishops Conference, was arraigned Thursday in Pretoria on additional charges of possessing dangerous weapons--two axes, a knife and a machete--and “prohibited materials,” as well as a revolver when he was arrested a year ago.