Aftermath of Night of Violence in Soweto : He Walked Past and Did Not See His Brother’s Body

SOWETO, South Africa — When Godfrey Mokoena’s brother set off for work early Wednesday, trudging through Soweto’s gloomy morning smog, he took his usual route, watching cautiously for the police after a night of violence in the sprawling black township but not noticing the body of a young man lying crumpled next to a school fence, one of the victims of those overnight clashes.

Later, a friend came with the news: Godfrey, 22, had been killed in the fighting. The body next to the fence was his.

“I couldn’t believe it when he told me Godfrey had died and where he was lying,” his older brother said, asking not to be quoted by name because of fear of the police. “I think that in the dark I must have passed my brother lying there. He was my last relative on earth. I have no more family.”

Godfrey Mokoena, unemployed after finishing school two years ago, was one of 12 blacks shot and killed by police late Tuesday and early Wednesday in the fiercest rioting since President Pieter W. Botha imposed a national state of emergency June 12. It gives the police and army virtual martial-law powers to quell South Africa’s civil unrest.

Shot in Legs, Head

Mokoena had been hit in the legs with shotgun pellets, his brother said, but was killed by a bullet in the back of his head that burst through his forehead. Heavy firing had continued through the night until well past dawn Wednesday, the brother said, and it was hard to say when or how Mokoena had died.

According to the government’s Bureau for Information, eight people were killed and 64 injured when policemen opened fire with rifles and shotguns after a grenade was thrown at them at a barricade of burning tires and other debris in the White City section of Soweto late Tuesday night. Four policemen were wounded in the incident.

Four more blacks were killed at another barricade, the bureau said, when police fired on youths attacking the car of a local official with machetes, clubs and iron bars. A fifth person was wounded.

Barricades had been erected throughout the impoverished White City area of Soweto, according to residents, after municipal officials attempted to evict residents taking part in a three-month-old rent strike. The violence spread to neighboring sections of Soweto and continued through Wednesday morning.

18 Dead, Residents Say

Residents put the death toll in these and other incidents at 18 or 20, and informed sources in Soweto said that at least three policemen were among the dead. Doctors at Soweto’s Baragwanath Hospital and private clinics estimated that at least 200 people were injured in the fighting. The government Information Bureau said late Wednesday that it could not confirm these reports.

Another victim of the nightlong fighting was a Soweto City Council member, Sydney N. Mkwanazi, 56, who was hacked to death with machetes and meat cleavers by youths angered both by the plans, approved by the council, to evict them from their homes and by the death of a colleague shot by the municipal police at Mkwanazi’s house in the Emdeni section of Soweto.

“They were waiting for him when he got out of the taxi, and they just hacked and cut and hacked and cut until he was like a side of beef,” his wife, Novascotia Mkwanazi, said Wednesday. “For them, Sydney was like a sacrificial offering.”

Mkwanazi’s death was confirmed by the Information Bureau, but it said he was killed when his house was set on fire.

Councilman Escapes Mob

A second council member barely escaped being burned to death by an angry mob that set fire to his home in Naledi, another section of eastern Soweto. Sigfried Manthata fled with his family out of the back door of their house as it was engulfed by flames and burned down, residents said. Almost all the other council members are now reported to be in hiding.

On Wednesday morning, police fired tear gas grenades to disperse a march on Soweto’s municipal offices by more than 500 residents demanding a reprieve from the threatened evictions.

Heavily armed policemen and soldiers patrolled White City and the other troubled sections of eastern Soweto for most of Wednesday, withdrawing in late afternoon as some of the barricades of oil drums, wrecked cars, discarded furniture and used tires continued to smolder. Only a few incidents of stone-throwing were reported, according to the government Information Bureau in Pretoria.

Through the day, mourners crowded the Mokoenas’s small, cream-colored cement-and-brick house in Rockville, near White City, to share the brother’s grief over Godfrey’s death. They filled the small yard, sitting on stools and upturned paint cans, and then spread up and down the rutted dirt street, talking over this latest tragedy in South Africa’s unremitting civil strife.

The brother, a laborer in his 40s, was clearly in shock over the young man’s death. They had known, he said, that the fighting was close, and residents of their neighborhood had been mobilized by their street committee to defend those being evicted, but he had gone to bed Tuesday evening thinking his brother safe with friends.

That his brother had been among those killed was still difficult to comprehend, he said, rubbing his head as if trying to rouse himself from a nightmare. “Godfrey was the last of my family left,” he said. “Now, I am all alone.”

Times researcher Michael Cadman in Soweto contributed to this story.