S. Africa Police Attack Blacks Protesting Vote

Police attacked demonstrators with whips and dogs today in the elite university town of Stellenbosch as hundreds of thousands of blacks staged protest strikes across South Africa on the eve of elections from which they are excluded.

Demonstrators rallied at universities and barricaded streets with flaming tires around the country to protest the elections, and police arrested 350 people.

In Cape Province, police moved in on more than 500 white students and black workers who marched through Stellenbosch in a protest against detention without trial and poor facilities for blacks.

Curious Onlookers

Men and women fled screaming through streets lined by curious onlookers as police beat them with six-foot whips and arrested scores of black and white demonstrators.

One television cameraman was dragged off with a dog hanging from his trousers.

The march and work stoppage took place on the eve of limited parliamentary elections, the most severe test of white support for the ruling National Party since it swept to power in 1948 on a platform of rigid race segregation.

Wednesday’s voting is for three houses of Parliament--the most powerful one for the country’s 5 million whites, and others representing the 3 million people of mixed race and nearly 1 million Asians.

Most nonwhite pupils across the country boycotted classes today, leaving township schoolrooms and playgrounds deserted.

In Durban on the Indian Ocean, some industries reported all black workers stayed home today. The giant Putco bus company said it experienced a total strike of black staff and passengers in Durban and other parts of Natal Province.

Commuter trains from the outlying townships into Cape Town and Johannesburg carried about 60% to 75% of their normal passenger loads, transportation officials said. Police said there was a 25% absentee rate in mostly rural Orange Free State.

78,000 Boycott Mines

The National Union of Mineworkers, the country’s largest union, said 78,000 members at 16 mines refused to work this morning.

Organizers said today’s general strike, most effective among black students and union members in the port cities of Cape Town, Durban and East London, will expand Wednesday.

At the multiracial University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, police arrested about 300 participants at an anti-election demonstration, including students, administrators and Franciscan monks.

Political analysts say the upsurge in black defiance of apartheid could play into the hands of the National Party by frightening white voters, who are particularly sensitive to security issues.

But the party faces strong challenges from both the left and right, and ruling party officials acknowledge privately that they could lose up to 20 of the 133 seats it holds to both the Democratic Party and the far-right Conservative Party.

Most analysts expect the National Party to retain an outright majority in the 178-seat white House of Assembly.