The Eastern Cape, one of South Africa's major industrial regions, was simmering. Police in armored vehicles patrolled black townships, while groups of black youths waited for a chance to vent their anger. Here and there, buildings smoldered, streets were barricaded. Less than a week earlier, 25 years to the day after the Sharpeville massacre of 69 black South Africans by security forces, the police had gunned down 19 black demonstrators near Uitenhage, 20 miles from Port Elizabeth, the Eastern Cape's largest city.
In the days that followed, there were scattered incidents of black turning on black, and at least 20 more people lost their lives. In several townships, crowds set the homes of black policemen ablaze in vengeance against those they took to be stooges of the white minority government. In Kwanobuhle, an impoverished black settlement of about 50,000, a mob descended upon the home of a black town councilor, hacked the man, his two sons and two employees to death, torched the house, then dragged the charred corpses into the open, where youngsters chanted around them. "Enough!" pleaded Johannesburg's Rand Daily Mail. "This country is tearing itself apart. We are writing our history in blood."
Last week the government of Executive President P.W. Botha tried to douse the fire--and in the process only added fuel to it. First, Botha convened a joint session of the three houses of Parliament--for whites, "coloreds" (of mixed race) and Indians--to call for an end to violence. In his televised address, the President also declared, ominously, that he was taking "necessary steps" to restore law-and-order. As he spoke, police in the Eastern Cape reported killing three blacks in clashes with township dwellers.
Two days later, the government banned 29 black organizations from holding any meetings over the next three months in 18 districts, mainly in the Eastern Cape. Among the groups was the broadly based antiapartheid alliance known as the United Democratic Front, 16 of whose leaders already face charges of treason. The ban, said the Rev. Christiaan Beyers Naude, an Afrikaner who is general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, was "an act of desperation on the part of the government."
Certainly, South Africa's white rulers, faced with parliamentary protest at home, threats of economic sanctions from abroad and a profound unrest kindled by one of the country's worst recessions in 50 years, seemed increasingly to be on the defensive. Yet, as ever, the more pressure exerted on the leadership, the deeper it dug in its heels, and the more it retreated into kragdadigheid, or a mailed-fist attitude. In an interview on ABC's Nightline program, Botha declared defiantly, "I am going to keep order in South Africa, and nobody is going to stop me."