Apartheid Foes Stage S. Africa ‘Victory Marches’

Tens of thousands of black workers and anti-apartheid activists, many carrying banners of the outlawed African National Congress and celebrating the imminent release of key ANC leaders, marched through the streets of more than a dozen South African cities Saturday.

Listening to militant anti-government speeches, and wearing placards saying “Long Live the ANC,” the protesters sang and danced in the downtown streets as police, for the most part, watched quietly from a distance.

“We are marching to freedom,” Moses Mayekiso, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, told about 12,000 who had marched from a downtown church to the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “We must give them (the government) the message that their time is over. They are talking about negotiation. We say they must scrap apartheid, imperialism, colonialism and capitalism.”

The marches, approved in advance by local officials, were organized by the Congress of South African Trade Unions to protest new labor laws that unions say will restrict their ability to strike. But in recent days, organizers had said the demonstrations also would serve as “victory marches” to welcome the release, expected within a day or two, of eight prominent black nationalists.

South Africa’s black townships have been tense in recent days as residents anticipate the arrival, after 26 years in jail, of Walter Sisulu, the 77-year-old former ANC general secretary, and seven other political prisoners. Sisulu and five others were moved from Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town to a prison near Soweto, the Johannesburg township that is Sisulu’s home, on Friday in preparation for their release.

Most of the marches were peaceful, although police said several people were arrested in Pietermaritzburg during a protest for breaking shop and bus windows and looting. March marshals kept most of the protests quiet, although riot police in Johannesburg ordered more than 10,000 people who had gathered at the final destination of the march to disperse, giving them an hour to do so. They left without incident.

An estimated 10,000 activists marched in Port Elizabeth, 2,000 in Bloemfontein, the conservative provincial capital of the Orange Free State, and several thousand in Durban. Several hundred marched in Secunda, where a municipal judge had approved the protest but the right-wing Conservative Party-controlled town council had denied permission.

In Cape Town, where about 5,000 joined the march, demonstrators took down the South African flag in front of Parliament and placed flags of the ANC and the outlawed South African Communist Party over a statue of former Prime Minister Louis Botha.

The Afrikaner Resistance Movement, a militant group of right-wing whites, issued a statement Saturday condemning “these Communist-inspired protest marches” and warned that if President Frederik W. de Klerk allows such protests to continue, the movement would find a way to stop them.

DeKlerk has taken the first steps toward creating a climate for negotiations with the black majority by allowing anti-government protests previously considered illegal under the state of emergency. He then ordered the release of the eight prisoners, including seven who have spent a quarter-century in jail.