COLUMN ONE : Witch Hunts: the Fatal Price of Fear : Superstition spurs a post-apartheid surge in slayings in South Africa. Few speak out to help those accused of sorcery or to catch their killers.

By all accounts, the mobs were deliberate, determined and deadly.

In Leeuwfontein, they dragged an 82-year-old grandmother from her home, put a gasoline-soaked tire around her neck and burned her alive. In Inverane, they marched two women to a riverbank, stoned them to death and torched their battered bodies. And in Moraphalala, an elderly woman was painfully poisoned to death and then heaved into her blazing hut.

The four grisly deaths earlier this month in different parts of rural South Africa had several things in common: The women were all accused of being witches. The killers were almost certainly their own friends and neighbors. And the slayings were not unusual.

In this year of liberation, when democracy dawned and the evil of apartheid ended in South Africa, an ancient crime has made an ugly comeback. At least 100 accused witches have been incinerated or stoned to death in 1994, sometimes by their husbands and children.

But the toll is misleading. More than one-third of the deaths occurred in the impoverished Seshego district, near Pietersburg. And local police Col. Mohlabi Tlomatsana concedes that “only a tiny proportion has been reported. The real problem is decidedly worse.”

Not all of those accused of casting evil spells, raising the dead or using supernatural powers were killed. Many were forced to flee their villages, had their homes burned and children chased from school, or took refuge with police.

Scores of accused witches and their families now live in Witches Hill, a kind of refugee camp for the damned, in a police-sponsored witches protection program.

It is an eerie place. Slithering lizards, gnarled cactus and razor-sharp thorn bushes line the sun-seared slope. Dust devils twirl in a bone-dry wind.

“They said I bewitched two women,” said one resident, Lina Ngoepe, a 60-year-old woman with an engaging smile and piercing eyes. “It was just pure jealousy. But they accused me of being a witch.”

Neighbors banished the Ngoepe family from the town of Early Dawn and torched their spacious six-room home. They moved to a one-room, mud-walled shanty here in September after living five months in a tent at a police station. A heap of charred window frames and a broken sewing machine are the only remnants of their former life.

“We were expelled by the community,” Ngoepe said sadly. “It was an injustice. They were so cruel to us.”

Police have arrested hundreds of people for witch-related murder, assault and arson but have won few convictions. Villagers rarely agree to cooperate or testify in court. Some fear reprisals. But most simply applaud the vigilantes.

“They feel the people who have murdered the witch have done the community a favor,” said Koos Van Der Heever, a Pietersburg lawyer who specializes in witchcraft cases. “If you don’t participate in the killing, it’s an offense according to traditional law. So the whole village shares the guilt.”

This grim side of the new South Africa is centered in Pietersburg in the vast northern Transvaal region north of Pretoria, especially in the dirt-poor, largely illiterate former black “homeland” of Lebowa. “Eighty percent of all murder cases in our region involve witchcraft,” Van Der Heever said.

One reason is that the desolate, treeless hills of the high veldt draw dramatic displays of lightning. Each summer, fierce thunderstorms shoot bolt after blinding bolt onto the grassy scrub, giant boulder piles and hapless hamlets. Scores are killed each year.

“Whenever someone is killed by lightning, we get a witch-burning,” said police investigator Willem Faurie. “Always. People say there is bad witchcraft in the area.”

Villagers blame witches for misfortune, like a road accident, or for events they cannot explain, like cancer or epilepsy.

But some secretly settle family feuds, target business competitors or simply express envy for a neighbor’s prosperity by accusing the person of witchcraft.

In one recent case, a long-destitute man was forced to flee the town of Bayswater after his two sons got jobs in the city and sent him money. When he suddenly bought furniture, his neighbors accused him of using zombies.

Even old age is suspect. “If a woman reaches 85 or 90, they say: ‘A normal person can’t get so old. She must be a witch,’ ” Faurie said.

In most cases, the village elders convene a tribal court if witchcraft is suspected. Every family must contribute to hire a special witch hunter called a nyanga , usually from outside the tribal area, to “sniff” out the demon. He gives the instigators a hallucinogenic potion to drink and then tells them to shout out the witch’s name.

Sometimes the suspected sorcerer is simply banished. More often, an angry mob of youths uses the agony of fire to exorcise the evil spirit forever. Women are usually the victims, but a man is sometimes targeted as a wizard.

“They kill him, his wife and his goats,” Faurie said. “They set fire to the house. Then they throw the bodies inside, and throw the dogs, cats and anything else alive into the fire. If his car is there, they burn that too.”

Witch hunts aren’t new in South Africa. But the gruesome reports of trial by fire have given pause to the new government. For one thing, the tense transition from apartheid to democracy sparked a witch-burning epidemic.

“The assumption was the new South Africa should be free, even free from superstition and traditional beliefs,” said sociologist Anthony Minnaar, a witchcraft expert at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria.

“So gangs of militant, politicized youths went around saying now is the time to get rid of witches once and for all,” he said. “They held tribal courts where anyone could accuse anyone else of being a witch. There was mass hysteria.”

Government officials have repeatedly condemned the attacks. Because many local police are also terrified of witches, a multi-agency police task force was created to investigate and prosecute what a spokesman called “this barbaric scourge.”

But the deaths have been an unsettling reminder that one of South Africa’s deepest divisions is between traditional beliefs and modern ways. The national government hopes to bridge the gap by incorporating traditional healers and herbalists into the formal health care system.

Many Western-trained doctors are skeptical at best. In a report released this month, the Medical Assn. of South Africa estimated that 80% of the black population regularly consults the country’s 200,000 traditional healers. The cultural barriers may be insurmountable, the group warned.

“The traditional healer shares with the patient a view of the world and the way it works which is completely alien to the non-African, Western-oriented health care worker, in particular with regard to the nature and causation of disease,” the report said. “This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for Western doctors or nurses to understand all those aspects of the patient which are essential to really effective medical care.”

Academics struggle to explain.

Robert Thornton, head of anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, compares witch hunts to lawsuits in America. “People (in the United States) sue because of problems of childbirth, or an operation going wrong, or accidentally falling into a hole,” he said. “It’s a search for blame. It’s the same with witches. It’s a denial of the fact that misfortune does happen, and it happens on a random basis.”

As in many countries, superstition is pervasive in South Africa. University students routinely scar themselves with razors before exams to ward off evil spirits. Businessmen pay witches for spells to prevent accidents in a new car. Millions raise their beds on bricks to guard against sinister, sex-mad trolls called tokoloshes.

But there is a more ominous side. Johannesburg, for example, abounds with muti shops, which sell animal potions and herbal brews for cures and spells. Although obviously illegal, some shops also sell human body parts.

One major supplier was a local police morgue. A sergeant was arrested last month and charged with hawking hearts, brains, genitals and other body parts from a Johannesburg mortuary.

Unfortunately, the most powerful muti is believed to come from children, especially girls. “In the townships, there are little girls that go missing every week,” Minnaar said. “It’s presumed they’re used for ritual murder.”

Murder was real, not presumed, on Dec. 18 in Inverane, about 60 miles from Pietersburg.

Three people have been charged with leading a mob of about 350 people who beat two women to death with rocks and sticks by a dry riverbed. They then burned the naked bodies on a pyre.

Police and witnesses say a man who returned to Inverane from Johannesburg for the holidays incited the slaying when he suddenly accused 38-year-old Mmaapholo Matlabo of killing his mother and another woman and turning them into zombies six years ago.

The village chief called a meeting of the kgoro, or tribal court, to consider the charges. Matlabo denied she was a witch but was ordered to take the man to his long-dead mother. If she could, she was a witch. If she couldn’t, she was disobeying village elders. Either way, it was a death sentence.

The kgoro deputized a small group to accompany the woman. But other youths armed with sticks quickly joined in, and the surging mob soon paraded her down the dusty street. Apparently hoping to escape, she blamed her neighbor, 54-year-old Manolobane Nkgoeng.

Nkgoeng’s 22-year-old daughter, Florina, watched in terror as the mob then took her mother and Matlabo half a mile to the riverbank. “I could not scream because I was so afraid,” she recalled. “I could not stop them.”

Asked if she knew anyone in the crowd, her eyes grew wide. “I could not recognize them,” she said quickly, looking nervously at the ground. “There were so many.”

Her father, Joseph Nkgoeng, 67, sat beside her and stroked his white mustache. His wife was not a witch, he insisted.

But his face was expressionless until his visitor got up to leave.

“My family is gone!” he suddenly cried. “Now, my family is gone.”