17,000 S. Africans Test New Rules on Protests

About 15,000 protesters, jogging, chanting and waving banners, marched today through the heart of Johannesburg to a police headquarters where many activists have been detained and interrogated.

Another anti-government protest, involving nearly 2,000 people, took place at the central square in Pretoria, the capital. Some demonstrators climbed onto a statue of Paul Kruger, a political patriarch of the Afrikaners who control the government.

Both protests were among the largest ever staged in the two cities and dramatized the impact of President Frederik W. de Klerk’s declaration this week that his white-led government will not block peaceful protests.

On Wednesday, a day after De Klerk’s statement, more than 20,000 people marched in Cape Town against police brutality, the largest such demonstration ever authorized by the government.

The Rev. Peter Storey, a Methodist leader, said at a news conference after today’s Johannesburg march that the series of peaceful protests marked a “turning point in the history of our land.”

In Johannesburg, marchers included black youths, dark-suited white professionals, nuns and prominent activists, among them Winnie Mandela, wife of jailed black nationalist Nelson Mandela. Many youths carried posters demanding his release and chanted “ANC! ANC!”--the initials of Mandela’s outlawed African National Congress guerrilla movement.

About 10,000 marchers began the protest, but the crowd swelled to about 15,000 as spectators joined the passing parade.

Traffic officers cordoned off side streets leading into the parade route but did not interfere as scores of black and white church leaders headed the procession down thoroughfares that usually would have been clogged with lunch-hour traffic.

In Pretoria and Johannesburg, the only police action reported was against white hecklers. Pretoria police led away two men shouting abuse at protesters, and Johannesburg officers warned a white man who threw eggs at the parade.