South Africa Bitter Reminders of Sharpeville

History seemed to be repeating itself, and more bleak ironies were piled high on a country already burdened with too many. Last Thursday marked the 25th anniversary of the massacre at Sharpeville, when police killed 69 blacks in the township 40 miles south of Johannesburg. That watershed conflict was still a vivid memory to many blacks in Langa, another township 25 miles from the southeast coastal city of Port Elizabeth. There, crowds defied a government ban on public gatherings to hold a procession in honor of three blacks who had been killed in clashes with police the previous weekend.

Before long the procession became a protest march, and the protest a confrontation. As up to 4,000 demonstrators strode along the highway between Langa and the white town of Uitenhage, their path was blocked by 19 policemen. Through a loudspeaker, the young lieutenant in charge of the patrol, Johannes Fourie, told the protesters to go home. They continued to push forward. A policeman fired a warning shot at the feet of the group's leaders. Still they advanced. With that, Fourie ordered the police to open fire on the marchers. At least 19 blacks were killed.

The Sharpeville massacre of 1960 had moved a defensive government to crack down with a vengeance, outlawing black protest movements, arresting black leaders, and so giving rise to a newly militant opposition. Today, after a quarter-century of struggle and despite recent promises of reform by President P.W. Botha, violence still holds sway in the divided land. The killings outside Uitenhage represented the bloodiest single episode since a wave of unrest began sweeping across the country last year. They also triggered more rioting at week's end in nearby townships, where angry mobs killed at least seven blacks they accused of being accomplices of the minority white government. In addition, they set fire to the homes of several black policemen. Five weeks ago, 18 blacks were killed in a confrontation with police at the Crossroads squatters' camp near Cape Town. In all, some 240 South Africans have perished in the turbulence of the past 13 months; at least 60 of them have died in the Sharpeville area.

Last week's cycle of events began in the vicinity of Port Elizabeth, where blacks protested crippling local unemployment by staging a weekend boycott of shops, buses and factories. The boycott resulted in five blacks being killed in clashes with the police. Anger at those deaths sparked the march at Langa. That conflict, in turn, set off further rioting.