100 Killed in Day of Black Township Fighting : South Africa: Leaders’ pleas for calm are met with new accusations. The feuding has taken more than 500 lives.

Pleas for peace from white and black leaders went unheeded Wednesday as 100 more black South Africans were stabbed, hacked or burned to death in factional fighting around Johannesburg. The latest killings brought the death toll to more than 500 in the last 10 days.

Township streets were barricaded with burning tires, and small bands of Zulu and Xhosa fighters with homemade weapons clashed throughout the day. Police and army reinforcements sought to keep the rival factions apart but had limited success.

In Vosloorus, east of Johannesburg, police found 39 bodies Wednesday morning. More than 40 people were killed in the townships of Kagiso, Tokhoza, Daveytown, Katlehong and Tembisa. Most of the dead were young men, although a 13-month-old baby was killed Tuesday night when gasoline bombs were tossed into two houses in Kwathema.

A group of mothers, fearing additional bloodshed, marched on the Vosloorus police station Wednesday to demand more police patrols in their neighborhoods.

The violence that has flared, off and on, since Aug. 13 in the townships that surround Johannesburg is the bloodiest in South Africa’s history. The death count, 502, already is nearly three times the number who died in the two months after the Soweto uprising of June 16, 1976.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said that revenge appeared to be the prime force behind the conflict, which pits Zulu migrant workers supporting Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha movement and residents, many of them Xhosas, who are loyal to Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.

“If you allow the law of ‘an eye for an eye,’ very soon the only people around are going to be blind,” said Tutu, who cut short a trip to Canada because of the violence and returned to South Africa on Wednesday.

“We are calling for tolerance, tolerance, tolerance and yet more tolerance,” Tutu said from his home in Soweto. “People must not seek to take revenge. We are making an appeal to our people: Please, yes, defend yourselves, but don’t pay back.”

Tutu suggested that an international peacekeeping force be organized to end the township wars.

The ANC has alleged that the white-led police force sides with the Zulus of Inkatha. President Frederik W. de Klerk denied that there is any bias among the police, about half of whom are black, and called for an end to “unfounded allegations of partisanship.”

De Klerk, after lengthy discussions with both Mandela and Buthelezi in recent days, on Wednesday issued a statement urging the two men to exert “strong leadership” and bring their two organizations together for high-level meetings.

Buthelezi has expressed eagerness to meet with Mandela, but Mandela is under strong pressure from within the ANC to avoid any such meeting. Many of Mandela’s supporters attribute the current conflict to Buthelezi’s attempts to expand Inkatha influence outside his home base of Natal province. Natal has been the scene of fighting between Zulus who support Buthelezi and those who support the ANC. Nearly 4,000 people have died in this fighting since 1987.

Tension is especially high among black leaders. On Tuesday, Buthelezi and Gen. Bantubonke Holomisa, leader of the Xhosa homeland of Transkei, met with government officials and agreed to call on all black leaders to stop blaming one another for the war and work for peace.

The statement had scarcely come out, however, when Holomisa started saying that the police were siding with Buthelezi’s fighters and Buthelezi was saying that Holomisa’s troops were helping ANC supporters fighting the Inkatha in Natal.

The current violence near Johannesburg has frightened many whites, driving some into the right-wing Conservative Party and triggering doubts in others about the future of democracy if the government keeps its promise to grant the black majority a vote in national affairs.

The fighting has also undermined the efforts of moderate black leaders, such as Mandela. The ANC-affiliated South African Youth Congress said Wednesday that it was urging its members to form neighborhood defense committees.

In addition, the violence threatens the ANC-government peace process. One sign of a deteriorating relationship between the ANC and the government is the daily ANC allegations of police complicity in Inkatha attacks.

Another point of contention has been De Klerk’s decision to drop the names of three key ANC leaders from the list of those granted temporary immunity from prosecution in order to participate in the peace talks. They are Chris Hani, chief of staff of the ANC’s military wing, Ronnie Kasrils, former intelligence chief for the ANC military, and Mac Maharaj, who, with Kasrils, had been building the ANC underground.

Maharaj has been in detention since last month. Kasrils is in hiding, and Hani is in the Transkei homeland. The police say that a charge of high treason is being investigated in the case of Hani, who angered the government by telling ANC guerrillas that the suspension of the armed struggle did not mean the war was over.

In a statement Wednesday, the ANC lodged “a most vigorous protest” against the withdrawal of immunity for the three men.

ANC sources said their organization might insist that Hani be allowed to take part in the talks designed to oversee the ANC cease-fire.