80,000 Mourners, 21-Gun Salute Bid Farewell to Apartheid Foe : South Africa: Assassinated black militant, a Communist, is buried next to white neighborhood.

After one of the biggest funerals in South African history, the country’s leading Communist and anti-apartheid guerrilla was buried Monday next to a white neighborhood with a Roman Catholic priest’s benediction and a 21-gun salute from his compatriots.

The funeral for Chris Hani, the black Communist Party leader and key African National Congress figure assassinated April 10 by a white extremist, drew more than 80,000 mourners to a packed Soweto soccer stadium. And, later, 20,000 gathered for the graveside service in this Johannesburg suburb, 20 miles away.

The 6 1/2-hour farewell to Hani, 50, was broadcast live nationwide on state-run television and radio, and millions of blacks also joined a one-day strike, closing shops and factories across the country.

South Africans hoped the services Monday would signal the end of 10 days of violent black protests, widespread looting and right-wing attacks that have followed Hani’s assassination.

The services, watched at a distance by thousands of heavily armed police officers, were generally peaceful and orderly. But police fought small bands of looters near the stadium and cemetery. At least six deaths and a dozen injuries were reported, police said.

Hani, one of the ANC’s most popular leaders, was memorialized as a martyr for the cause of black liberation. ANC leaders said Hani’s death has unleashed a fury that only significant progress at the negotiating table could ease.

“Black lives are cheap and will remain so as long as apartheid continues to exist,” ANC President Nelson Mandela said, contending that police have treated right-wing extremists with “kid gloves.”

“The assassin and those behind him think they have killed a man and all he stood for,” added Joe Slovo, one of the ANC’s top white leaders. “But they have mobilized the greatest army this country has ever seen. It is an army for democracy.

“However many of us they (the rightists) kill, they still represent a dying cause,” added Slovo, who along with Mandela was named on right-wing “hit lists” that police found in the home of Hani’s alleged assassin.

So far, police have arrested two right-wing whites in Hani’s death. Janusz Walus was arrested with the murder weapon shortly after the killing and Clive Derby-Lewis, a Conservative Party leader, was arrested Saturday night.

President Frederik W. de Klerk, speaking to Parliament in Cape Town, said Hani’s death has “once again plunged South Africa into crisis.” And he blamed the crisis on “radical forces at all ends of the political spectrum.”

The deadly mix of black anger and white fear is “threatening to destroy the hopes of all peace-loving South Africans,” De Klerk added. “We dare not play into the hands of those who are trying to thwart the negotiating process.”

The ANC remains committed to constitutional negotiations with De Klerk’s government. But it is using Hani’s death to demand swifter progress.

An uprising of militant black youth, and renewed attacks on blacks by right-wing whites, has generated deep fears across the country. A gun shop owner here said that residents of the mostly white neighborhood near the cemetery had bought hundreds of handguns in recent days.

“Most people here are peace-loving people,” said Brian Robinson, 21, the gun seller. “But sometimes it’s hard, especially when you hear these people (protesters) saying, ‘Our next bullet’s for you.’ ”

Worried residents here invited more than 100 heavily armed commandos from the right-wing Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), of which Walus was a member, to protect their homes Monday.

“We are worried about a savage horde coming to wreak havoc here,” said Edmund Heine, a 45-year-old AWB member who was guarding one house near the cemetery with a shotgun across his lap and a pistol in his belt. “This is a purely defensive mission. But we will not hesitate to shoot.”

The AWB considers itself fervently anti-Communist. And, like dozens of militant right-wing groups in South Africa, it has applauded Hani’s alleged killer and even offered financial support for Walus’ defense.

No black-white clashes were reported here, although some black mourners carried handguns and automatic weapons. When Hani’s coffin was lowered into the ground with a 21-gun salute, many mourners joined in, firing their weapons into the air.

The shooting ended only after ANC official Tokyo Sexwale, in a voice that boomed over the loudspeakers, demanded: “Cease your fire! The 21-gun salute has ended.”