FIRST OFF . . .

Much of the South African press is opposing the apartheid regime’s last-minute banning Friday of the Sir Richard Attenborough film “Cry Freedom.” The film, about the death in police custody in 1977 of black consciousness leader Steve Biko, was approved by government censors, played briefly in about 30 theaters and was then banned and seized by police. “South Africans have been reminded anew that the government wants to decide for them what they should see, think, feel,” the independent Sunday Star said in an editorial. The independent Sunday Times, the country’s largest Sunday newspaper, said the government was more worried about the film’s “considerable truth” than its alleged anti-South Africa propaganda. “The challenge of ‘Cry Freedom’ for whites is to commit themselves to redressing those wrongs (of racial discrimination),” the Sunday Times said. On state TV on Friday, Information Minister Stoffel van der Merwe acknowledged that the banning of the film could open the government to ridicule at home and abroad.