COLUMN ONE : In Office, Under Fire in S. Africa : Black town councilors see a vital role for themselves, but activists see them as a part of apartheid. Their homes have been attacked, and six have been killed. Hundreds have resigned.

Let the record show that Joe Mphokeng did not want to be a township councilor in the first place. He was closing in on retirement, living comfortably, and he did not need the trouble.

Dozens of black councilors and their families had been killed over the years by young radicals who said the councils were puppets of apartheid. But by 1988 the government had locked up its opponents, the townships were quiet and Mphokeng’s friends persuaded him to run.

As he coasted to victory, Mphokeng vowed to use his seat on the Mamelodi Town Council to do some good. At first, as he helped constituents caught in the web of apartheid and fought development deals that put gold watches on other councilors’ wrists, Mphokeng thought he was succeeding.

Then the African National Congress was legalized, and it thought otherwise. Anti-apartheid leaders in Mamelodi summoned Mphokeng to a meeting in June to demand his resignation and, to their surprise, he showed up. But he refused to step down.

A few weeks later, as the Mphokeng family was watching “Dallas” on television, a hand grenade crashed through the living room window, rolled under a sofa and exploded. Mphokeng’s wife, Thembi, and their 12-year-old son, George, were injured.

The only thing left intact that night was Mphokeng’s resolve to remain a councilor and a wall hanging that read: “Our home is open to God’s friends, guests and sunshine.”

On Christmas Eve, though, after months of threats and fear, Mphokeng regretfully resigned.

Black town councils across South Africa are increasingly under siege. Of the 1,867 black councilors elected in 1988, nearly half have resigned, most of them in recent months. This year, six councilors have been assassinated and the homes and property of 87 others attacked.

Councilors say that if they leave, whites will quickly take over the townships and blacks will be deprived of any say or experience in local government. The ANC wants the council system to collapse, arguing that it is based on apartheid and ultimately controlled by whites.

ANC-aligned “civic associations” this month urged blacks to boycott businesses owned by township councilors, shun councilors and their families and stage protests outside councilors’ homes. The associations say they are not advocating violence, but some of their supporters have not gotten the message.

Mphokeng, a slightly built 59-year-old with graying beard and wire-rimmed spectacles, was not a brave man so much as a stubborn one. Weeks ago, he admitted privately that it was probably a mistake to run for office in the first place. Of his vanquished election opponent, he said ruefully, “She must be feeling very happy.”

The Mphokeng family spent two years of restless nights listening for more trouble. But the councilor always said that he would not be cowed.

“Look, people,” Mphokeng told a hostile crowd a few months ago, “I was elected democratically. I could understand if the people who elected me told me to resign. But you are not the people who elected me. And I cannot disappoint them.”

He had held on a long time, longer than most.

The people who elected Mphokeng and those who wanted him to resign live together in a crowded township wedged into the base of a short mountain range, 15 miles east of the clean, jacaranda-lined streets of the capital, Pretoria.

Mamelodi has a pretty name, which means “birds whistling,” but a dusty and characterless facade. Older residents call it simply “the location,” as most ghettos in South Africa were once known.

Mamelodi’s wood-paneled council chambers resemble that of any medium-size U.S. city and the coat of arms carries the generic slogan: City of Progress. The seat of government is a single-story brick building surrounded by stone walls frosted with rolls of razor wire.

The Mamelodi councilors are guided through their monthly agenda of zoning changes and building permits by Mayor Sydney Mokone, a bulky man with three large, shiny rings. (“One of my secretaries will give you my business card,” he told a reporter.)

Mphokeng worked in Room 54, one of the dimly lit offices assigned to the newest of the 14 councilors. The desk was covered with a plastic tablecloth, in a blue and red floral print. His brown felt hat rested on a peg on the wall, and visitors sat on two wooden benches.

“I stepped into the furnace, and I hadn’t expected it,” he said in his office a few weeks ago. “I thought I was going to help the people, not knowing that they would start this nonsense.

“It’s frustrating, you know,” he added. “You want to do a good job, and we are doing a lot. But the ‘civics’ are interrupting us. And if we don’t do their thing, they come and petrol-bomb us. This is democracy?”

In 1988, Mphokeng made an ideal candidate. He was widely known as Pae-Pae (pronounced Pie-Pie), a character he played in a popular dramatic series on an African-language television station. A father of five and grandfather of two, he was well liked by neighbors, went to church regularly and sang in a community choir.

About a quarter of Mamelodi’s voters turned up on election day, and Mphokeng won, 2,200 to 950, over a nurse in Ward 4. He read his victory as a sign that Mamelodi wanted new, honest councilors. Then, while under attack from new enemies, he was shunned by many of his friends.

“This is what I ask myself all the time: ‘What have I done wrong? Why my family?’ ” he said.

Mphokeng knew from the beginning that his was a dangerous, nearly impossible job. Local elections have been widely boycotted, and black councils, being segregated from the large tax bases of the next-door white communities, are perennially starved for funds. As a result, many councils are corrupt.

Blood has been spilled on both sides of the issue. During 1984-86, some councilors were murdered by angry mobs in fiery “necklaces” of gasoline-soaked tires. Police killed 13 blacks in Mamelodi during a march to demand that the council resign.

In August, 1989, a year after his election, a gasoline bomb came through the Mphokengs’ bedroom window as they slept, setting fire to the curtains and carpet next to their bed.

No one was hurt that time and Mphokeng continued his work, drawing the monthly council allowance of 720 rand (about $290). He began an unofficial small claims court for domestic disputes in his office, deciding cases on noisy neighbors, disobedient children and cheating husbands.

Most of the 350,000 Mamelodians are poor, earning less than $1,000 a year on average, and housing is scarce. Crime is rampant; unemployed and unemployable young men hang out at the local taxi rank. The next generation’s prospects are not much better; political disputes kept the schools closed for many weeks this year.

In council meetings, Mphokeng criticized private developers who, under lucrative contracts signed with the council, were building houses that, at $20,000 each, were well beyond the resources of most Mamelodians. Some councilors privately began to think of Mphokeng as an irritant.

“Joe is not an easy man,” admitted his wife, Thembi. “He doesn’t just agree with everything. He is a hard nut and you must convince him.”

Mphokeng thought the country’s troubles were over in February, when President Frederik W. de Klerk legalized the ANC and freed Nelson Mandela. Mphokeng recorded Mandela’s first Soweto speech, and he pasted a photograph of Mandela into the family scrapbook.

But the new era of political freedom caused even more problems for Mphokeng. Anti-apartheid leaders resurrected the civic associations, ANC-inspired alternative governments that had been crushed by arrests and banning orders in 1986.

The most pressing matter was the rent boycott that the civic associations had launched five years earlier to protest the township government’s high fees and poor services. Now residents were prepared to resume payments to the town council, but they wanted the arrears, which amount to more than $500 million countrywide, erased from the books.

The associations also resumed their dormant campaigns to pressure township councils to resign. Their goal is to send a message to the government before negotiations for a new constitution begin: Blacks will refuse to participate in anything less than democratic, multiracial local governments.

When Mphokeng refused to step down in June, one young anti-apartheid activist warned him that a “black car” would one day run over the obstacles to black liberation, obstacles such as Mphokeng.

Three weeks later, Mphokeng’s son, George, overheard several women in the street saying that all the township councilors would soon be killed. He ran breathlessly into the house.

“They say they are going to kill us and kidnap me,” he told his mother.

Two days later, the hand grenade was lobbed over the Mphokengs’ brick fence and through the living room window. George dived for his mother, knocking her into a hallway as the grenade exploded. A three-inch piece of shrapnel lodged in George’s abdomen and another shard seared Thembi’s leg. Relatives rushed the two to the hospital.

That night, Mphokeng watched glumly as his living room burned and delighted young activists danced in the street outside.

“It was a terrible scene,” Mphokeng said.

Pasty Malefo, an ANC activist and civic association leader who lives in Mphokeng’s neighborhood, came to the house later to offer his sympathy.

Malefo remembers Mphokeng asking: “What am I dying for? I’m not making money on this council.”

Malefo did not think any civic association members were behind the attack, but he acknowledged that the angry youngsters in his organization can be difficult to control.

“Much as we regret this, we can understand why they (councilors) are being attacked,” Malefo said. “And as much as we’d like to stand up and say, ‘Stop attacking councilors,’ we can’t do that unless we can stop the attacks by the police on our comrades as well.”

Mphokeng was not sure whom to blame, but he was wary of the civic association’s sympathy. “A python licks the victim’s face very smooth, only to prepare for the swallowing,” he said.

Malefo said Mphokeng “may have good intentions. But he is very misguided. Even the dumbest of these councilors must realize these councils don’t work.”

Like the angry youth of today, Mphokeng has deep emotional scars from a lifetime of being black in a country controlled by whites. He was born in a grass hut on a white man’s farm in 1931, just as dawn turned the vast African sky golden. On the same day, a son was born to the farmer, who decided to give his and his farmhand’s sons the same name--Josiah Horace van der Merwe.

The black young Josiah started school on the farm, going to classes for six months and spending the rest of the year in the fields of maize, peas, potatoes and fruit trees. Children of black farmhands were expected to work without pay, and white farmers discouraged workers from attending school.

Josiah and his 14 brothers and sisters wanted to go to school full time in town, and their father agreed. But the children were harassed by white farmers on their way to school each day. Mphokeng still has a scar on his leg from the whip used by one of those men. “It is a mark I don’t ever forget,” Mphokeng said.

Mphokeng’s father, the third generation to work the Van der Merwe farm, moved to the nearby township and took a job carving tombstones. It was there that the black Josiah Horace van der Merwe took his father’s last name and became Josiah Mphokeng.

After high school, Mphokeng studied at a teachers college and moved to Pretoria in search of work. At first, he scrubbed floors, washed dishes and worked in the garden for a white family, earning about $1 a month.

One day, he remembers, he discovered a letter that was addressed to him but had been opened weeks earlier by his employers. It was from the Native Commissioner’s Office, offering Mphokeng a job. He went to work as an interpreter for the native commissioner, who traveled the country meeting with African chiefs.

In 1953, Mphokeng joined the South African police and quickly rose to the rank of sergeant. He soon became disillusioned.

“The law says you can arrest a person, any person, who is committing a crime in your presence,” Mphokeng said. In practice, black officers could not arrest whites. He decided to quit after a judge dismissed charges against a white man because Mphokeng, a black man, was the arresting officer.

“I said to myself, ‘This is nonsense,’ ” Mphokeng remembered. “Then I just woke up one morning and I said, ‘Resign.’ ”

He went to work on an African-language radio station run by the South African Broadcasting Co. He quit to help his wife start a driving school in their home. He still works part time as a radio and TV actor.

“All my life we blacks have been told to carry out instructions and not given a chance to think,” Mphokeng said. “Every black man is against apartheid. But as far as I’m concerned, any black person who lives in this country works for the system.”

He has learned, though, to bury his bitterness. In the 1970s and ‘80s, when the townships were in flames, “we wanted to say something,” he said. “But once you talked bad about the government, you got detained. I didn’t want to see myself behind bars.”

Not a day went by this year that Mphokeng did not think about stepping down. Several township councils near Pretoria collapsed and he had begun to feel like the only target left.

“We are the only ones still holding on,” he said two weeks ago. “And these people will definitely attack us.”

Many of the people who pushed Mphokeng to run for office had fallen silent.

“He was their favorite before the ANC was unbanned, but now people have backed away,” Thembi said.

“It’s not that they are against us,” Joe Mphokeng said. “But they are afraid of being victimized themselves.”

Mphokeng had wanted to stay on because he did not like the alternative. If the council resigned, he pointed out, a white administrator would just run the township with residents’ money. Would not it be better, he asked, for honest black men to work for change from within the system?

Malefo, the civic association official, considered that question for a long time. “I see his point,” Malefo said. “But if he’s on the people’s side, he should do what the people want him to do.”

On Christmas Eve, Mphokeng was warned that another hand grenade attack was imminent. Within hours, he and eight other councilors decided to announce their resignations.

Since then, it has been quiet around the Mphokeng home. Mphokeng says his convictions have not changed, but they do not seem worth the price anymore. He laments the death of representative government in Mamelodi, and predicts that township conditions will get worse.

“Please tell the people that Josiah was forced to resign,” he said regretfully. “It was the only way to save my life and my family’s lives too.”

Next: The black policeman.