Why there will be more bullets before the ballots in South Africa
by Eric Ransdell
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The students rioting outside the gates of the University of Bophuthatswana were demanding gasoline to make molotov cocktails to throw at the police. The white driver panicked and floored the accelerator of his small pickup truck in an attempt to plow through their makeshift roadblock. In an instant every window in the truck disintegrated in a hail of stones, one striking the driver in the side of the face as he made his getaway. "I'm in the history program here," said one youth still clutching his stone, "but this makes no sense at all."
Not much did last week in Bophuthatswana, the nominally independent black homeland created in 1977 by South Africa's apartheid government. At the beginning of the week, the impoverished homeland known as "Bop" was under the control of Lucas Mangope, a 70-year-old former schoolteacher best known for crushing dissent and accumulating millions. By week's end, the shattered capital Mmabatho had changed hands five times, Mangope had fled and at least 50 blacks and whites had died in the fighting. Now fears are rife of even more violence in the run-up to next month's democratic elections.
Executions. The racist nature of much of the violence exposed the deep fissures that remain in South African society four years after the end of apartheid. In one of the most widely reported incidents, two wounded members of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) who had responded to a call for right-wingers to come to the homeland to prop up the Mangope regime were executed by a Bophuthatswana soldier. South African television gave heavy play to footage of the men pleading for help moments before their execution.
But it was only one of many race-based attacks to occur during a four-day period that degenerated into almost total anarchy. A source at Victoria Hospital in the adjacent town of Mafeking reported that in one day at least 43 people had been killed and 240 wounded, most by right-wing whites. At roadblocks, white motorists were attacked by gangs of angry black youths. In one incident, white reporters who had been cheered the previous day after Mangope's departure were surrounded by youths who threatened to douse them with gasoline and set them alight.
Hope, however, did emerge from the chaos. Mangope, who had missed last week's registration for elections, promised to take his party into the polls as part of a rumored deal that saw South African troops moving into the homeland to restore order. In Natal province, his ally in the right-wing Freedom Alliance, the KwaZulu homeland's chief minister, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, agreed to abide by the decision of international mediators who will be brought in to settle outstanding constitutional differences between the Zulu leader, the African National Congress and the government. But, warned Buthelezi, "if this is a foretaste of things to come, then God must help this country."
Growing rift. The biggest defeat was handed to the white right-wingers, already split between hard-liners who oppose next month's elections and more moderate Afrikaner nationalists. The growing rift in the white right only promised to deepen after Afrikaner Volksfront leader Gen. Constand Viljoen told AWB members to leave the homeland hours after the invasion. The split, which both the government and ANC have been exploiting, may now give South Africa's security forces the opportunity to move against right-wing radicals.
Yet the conflict has done little to reassure fearful whites and nervous foreign investors. Outside the Mega-City shopping complex in Mmabatho, one middle-aged black man shook his head as hundreds of homeland residents emerged with looted goods ranging from graduation robes to refrigerators. "It's so bad; this looting is terrible," he said, seconds before helping three young men load two stolen television sets into the back of his car.
But for most blacks in Bophuthatswana, looting was merely a logical extension of what the corrupt Mangope government has been doing to the homeland for the last 16 years. The crisis began simmering last month when Bophuthatswana civil servants went on strike over pensions, which many feared would disappear with Mangope after the ANC's expected victory in next month's elections. Mangope's refusal to participate in the elections was the spark that ignited last week's conflagration.
Now elections inside the once repressive homeland are all but certain. Yet, despite their pledges to participate, questions remain for war-torn Natal, Buthelezi's stronghold, and areas dominated by the white right wing. If Bophuthatswana, considered the weak link in the Freedom Alliance chain, has proved anything, it is that there will be more bullets before South Africa's 39 million people have the chance to mark their ballots.
[Map not available.] Bophuthatswana, Transkei, Ciskei and Venda are so-called homelands in South Africa.
