S. Africa Blacks Commemorate Soweto Uprising : Work Stoppage, Church Services Mark ’76 Riots

Hundreds of thousands of black South Africans stayed home from work Thursday to mark the anniversary of the 1976 Soweto student uprising, which touched off six months of riots that left more than 600 people dead.

Scattered incidents of violence were reported Thursday, including a hand grenade explosion that killed a black man in a white suburb of Cape Town. According to police, the victim was an African National Congress guerrilla who had been planning to set off a mine later in the day.

Railway lines near Cape Town were struck by several bomb attacks, and a bomb exploded Thursday night outside the civic center in Seapoint, near Cape Town, during a Conservative Party meeting. No one was injured.

But the work stayaway was peaceful, compared to previous observances, with more than a dozen churches across the country sponsoring memorial services and speakers vowing to continue their struggle against the white minority government, despite emergency regulations under which thousands of black activists have been detained.

In Soweto, South Africa’s largest black township, trains and buses ran nearly empty to nearby Johannesburg and traffic on the streets was light, except for strengthened police and army patrols. The Sowetan, a daily newspaper with the largest black readership in the country, did not publish.

Soweto Day is not an official holiday, and the government has fought attempts to make it one. But some companies give their black employees the day off, many shops close and most public and private schools throughout the country treat the day simply as a sort of “mid-term” holiday.

The government, apparently wanting to show that the state of emergency has restored calm to the townships, did not ban any protest meetings Thursday, as it has done in the past.

Security forces were on hand, however, and two officers charged several hundred singing and chanting people who poured out of a memorial service at the Regina Mundi Cathedral in Soweto. The group dispersed, and there were no injuries.

Speakers Urge Unity

About 1,500 people had attended a four-hour memorial service at the church, where speakers talked of restoring unity among blacks in the struggle against apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial separation under which the country’s 26 million blacks are denied a voice in national affairs.

“On June 16, 1976, the regime waged war on students in Soweto and other black areas,” said Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, an official with the National Council of Trade Unions. “What we must do is go back to the unity demonstrated by those students in 1976. We need to continue in the memory of all those who died, who have gone into exile and have been placed in detention since then.”

Many of the usual Soweto Day speakers are either in detention or banned from political activity. The United Democratic Front, the country’s largest anti-apartheid organization, has been effectively shut down by a Feb. 24 government restriction order.

Shortly after dawn Thursday, on a clear autumn day like the one 12 years before, a dozen people gathered in Soweto’s Avalon Cemetery around the grave of Hector Pieterson, said to be the first person killed by police on June 16, 1976. He was 13 years old. On his headstone are the words: “Deeply mourned by his parents, sisters, and a nation that remembers.”

Now in Wheelchair

His sister, Margot Pieterson, 17, placed a wreath of yellow chrysanthemums and red carnations on the grave. Also attending the graveside service was 29-year-old Popi Buthelezi, now in a wheelchair because of injuries she suffered that day.

The Soweto riots had begun as a student march to protest the use of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in black schools. Afrikaans is the first language of most white South Africans. The next month, the government announced that blacks could choose the language of instruction in their schools.

At a memorial service Thursday in Cape Town, Hector’s mother, Dorothy, wept as she described her son’s last hours. She said she had urged him to wear warmer clothing that morning, but his last words to her were: “It’s all right, Mama.”

It was the second time this month that workers had defied the government’s ban on political stayaways. More than 1 million blacks stayed away from work for three days last week to protest the clampdown on anti-apartheid activities and a labor bill that would curtail some union rights.

Minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok chose the occasion to announce that the government had killed nine members of the outlawed ANC during the past week. The nine, six men and three women, died in a clash between police and two heavily armed groups of alleged ANC operatives, the police said.

“I again warn the ANC,” Vlok said. “We will not allow it to kill or hurt our people. If its terrorists cross into this country, we will ruthlessly hunt them down.”

Johannesburg Bureau assistant Michael Cadman contributed to this article.