Mandela, De Klerk Seek to Halt Ethnic Slayings : South Africa: ANC pleads with blacks to ‘stop slaughtering one another.’ Six killed in attack on commuter train. Fighting spreads to Soweto.

Nelson Mandela and President Frederik W. de Klerk, facing a serious challenge to their peace process, met Thursday to explore ways of ending ethnic clashes that have taken more than 150 lives since Monday in black townships near Johannesburg.

After the meeting in Pretoria, Mandela’s African National Congress issued an impassioned plea for blacks to “stop slaughtering one another” because “every black life lost prolongs the period of our suffering.”

The killing, which began with clashes between Zulus and Xhosas in three townships southeast of Johannesburg, spread Thursday to Soweto, South Africa’s largest black township. Scores of men armed with machetes and knives attacked a commuter train and killed six people.

Later, mobs carrying weapons ranging from axes to AK-47 rifles rampaged through Soweto’s streets, and the day’s death toll rose to at least 10. More than 120 were injured. Hundreds of police officers and army troops sought to impose themselves between the warring factions, using tear gas and shotguns to break up the crowds.

At one point, the police designated a bridge as no-man’s-land between two angry mobs as civic leaders held impromptu peace talks. The groups dispersed, but scattered confrontations erupted throughout the day in Soweto, a township of 2.2 million people.

“It’s frightening, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Belede Mazwai, a Xhosa mother of three, said Thursday night as a gang of Zulus with guns and spears ran past her home in a middle-class section of Soweto. “I just want out of this place. The whole thing is collapsing.”

Soweto police were inundated with calls from worried residents Thursday night, and a police dispatcher told many callers that he did not have enough officers to send to their neighborhoods.

Late Thursday, Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok and a regional police commander met in Soweto with Mandela and a delegation of residents in an effort to halt the violence. There was no indication that any specific measures were discussed or whether any plan had emerged from the earlier meeting between Mandela and De Klerk.

“I’m certain we’re going to curb this violence,” Brigadier Leon Mellet, spokesman for the Law and Order Ministry, said in a televised interview. “We’re getting more men on the ground, but we need to get the warring parties together so we can end this violence.”

Mellet said the police believe that the week’s trouble began with “a simple fight” in a men’s hostel in Tokoza township, where a Zulu resident killed a Xhosa over a woman. Then, he said, ethnic animosities, rarely seen in urban centers, were stirred by rumors, leading to violence.

The escalating unrest has presented a major challenge to the government as well as the ANC and its rival, Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Zulu-based Inkatha movement. Although the ANC is a multiracial organization, Mandela is a Xhosa and the ANC is perceived by some to be led primarily by Xhosas.

Buthelezi blames the trouble on Mandela’s refusal to meet with him. The ANC says the violence has been caused by attempts by Buthelezi’s Inkatha movement to force non-Zulus to join its ranks.

Political analysts say the fighting is an outgrowth of three years of clashes between supporters of Inkatha and the ANC in Buthelezi’s home base of Natal Province. More than 3,000 people have died in that feud, which has most frequently been a battle over scarce resources between middle-class blacks who support the ANC and those in squalid squatter settlements who support Inkatha.

Much of the fighting in Johannesburg-area townships has started in poverty-stricken squatter camps and overcrowded hostels, to which tens of thousands of single men, many of them Zulus, have moved from rural areas in search of work in Johannesburg.

Leaders of the far-right Conservative Party said Thursday that the fighting supports their theory that ethnic groups in South Africa cannot live together peacefully.

In its statement Thursday, the ANC pleaded for calm in the townships. It said that “the blood of black people is flowing like rivers.”

“Why do we butcher one another like beasts?” the ANC asked. It blamed the trouble on “a few misguided individuals calling on us to fight against one another.”

The ANC noted that, although blacks have political differences, speak different languages and come from different parts of the country, they should unite in their desire for better education, housing and jobs.

“We can and must debate, yes,” the ANC said. “But butchering one another will not take anyone anywhere.”