South Africa Something Burning Inside

The rumors raced through the maze of jam-packed shanties like a burning fuse: a fleet of government vehicles had arrived to relocate all 60,000 residents of the settlement, and a squad of toughs had been brought in to add muscle to the operation. The rumors proved false, but by dawn, the men of Crossroads, a wretched black squatters' camp in the sand dunes just outside Cape Town, began blocking the roads around their shacks with makeshift barricades of logs, stones, oil drums, old tires and anything else they could find. Then they set the barriers ablaze.

As uniformed policemen and riot squads raced to the scene with canisters of tear gas, they found themselves confronted by roughly 3,000 protesters, some of them lifting their arms in a black-power salute and chanting "Amandhla!" ("Power!"). The slum dwellers hurled stones at passing vehicles; the authorities opened fire with rubber bullets and bird shot. For hours, police chased rioters through a labyrinth of tumbledown shacks. By the time the battle had subsided the following day, 28 police vehicles had been damaged and 26 policemen injured on the one side; 18 were dead and 250 wounded on the other.

Just as the smoke was beginning to clear in Crossroads, the government struck back with its biggest nationwide political crackdown in years. In a carefully choreographed maneuver across several cities, South African security police swooped down on 70 homes and offices belonging to opponents of the government and, in particular, members of the United Democratic Front (U.D.F.), a broad- based alliance of more than 700 nonwhite community organizations, trade unions and church groups. Over a dozen dissidents were detained. Seven were charged with treason and joined eight other political activists in jail, awaiting what is expected to be a "show trial" in Durban at the end of March. If convicted of treason, they could face life imprisonment.

Again, South Africa seemed trapped in a vicious cycle: the fear of repression had sparked resentment, and the expression of that resentment had set off more repression. But last week's disturbances were especially dispiriting because they seemed to mock a host of recent hints by the white minority government that it might be open to relaxing its system of apartheid, or official separation of the races. Less than three weeks before the rioting at Crossroads, the government had pledged to suspend, and reassess, its policy of forcibly resettling blacks. A week before the sudden arrest of the opposition leaders, attention was focused on Executive President P.W. Botha's offer to release Nelson Mandela, 67, the nation's best-known political prisoner, and to recognize Mandela's outlawed, militant African National Congress on condition that the A.N.C. lay down its arms. But the eruptions last week suggested that peaceful negotiations between South Africa's white rulers and their black opponents may still be a distant prospect. Said the moderate Johannesburg Star: "We fear that the government may be on a course of conflict resolution that stifles the national debate before it has started."