Black guerrillas step up their attacks inside the laager
The light brown imbuia wood paneled Supreme Court chamber in Pretoria's imposing Palace of Justice was crowded with black spectators and white plain-clothes officers last week as Judge Charl Theron entered the room. Guilty of high treason, said Theron, referring to the three young black men in the dock, all members of South Africa's long-banned black liberation organization, the African National Congress (ANC). The sentence: death by hanging.
The condemned men—David Moise, 25, Johannes Shabangu, 26, and Anthony Tsotsobe, 25—responded to the sentence with forced smiles, a clenched-fist salute and the first strains of a freedom song ("What shall we do to the Boers who shot the people of Soweto?"). Outside, police, occasionally using attack dogs, dispersed a crowd of blacks waiting in Church Square. There were scuffles, and several people were arrested. A small group of women, swathed in brightly patterned blankets, began singing Nkosi Sikelele Afrika (God Bless Africa), the ANC's anthem.
The courtroom where South Africa's harsh justice was meted out last week was the same in which, 17 years earlier, ANC Leader Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of sabotage, including the 1962 bombing of a Cabinet minister's office in Pretoria. The charges against last week's prisoners were graver—an index of how the ANC, long ago an advocate of peaceful change, now reaches for the gun. Moise was charged with the 1980 bombing of fuel storage tanks at South Africa's SASOL coal liquefaction plant, the most spectacular guerrilla attack ever staged in the country, with damage estimated at $7.2 million. Shabangu had thrown a grenade into the home of a black policeman in the sprawling black township of Soweto, near Johannesburg. Tsotsobe had been involved in an armed assault on a Johannesburg police station and in several bombings. As the authorities made clear during the trial, the three men were only part of an increasingly warlike campaign against the government: there have been 38 ANC attacks in South Africa this year, 34 of them in the past three months.
The last of those assaults occurred on the morning of the sentencing. A bomb blast ripped up a section of rail line outside the coastal city of East London—one more sign that the ANC, which was outlawed in 1960, is trying harder than ever to induce a climate of terror among whites in the South African laager. From neighboring Zimbabwe, ANC Acting President Oliver Tambo, 63, served notice that such violence will increase. Said he: "South Africa is a highly developed industrialized state. A few determined guerrillas can do a lot of damage—and we have more than just a handful of people in the country."