South Africa "I Am Proud to Give My Life"

The government had been warned that hanging Benjamin Moloise, 30, a black upholsterer and poet, would lead to bloodshed. The U.S. had asked State President P.W. Botha to "take another look" at the planned execution. The Soviet Union, the European Community, the 49-nation Commonwealth of Britain and the U.N. Security Council, among others, had also asked that Moloise's life be spared. But Botha refused all appeals for clemency, and last week, shortly after dawn, Moloise went to the gallows at Pretoria Central Prison. In Washington, White House Spokesman Larry Speakes told reporters: "We hoped that this action would not be taken."

In Johannesburg, which had so far been spared serious racial violence, news of the hanging was greeted with outrage. After a noontime memorial service for Moloise, hundreds of blacks poured into the streets of the city's white downtown area and went on a four-hour rampage. Two policemen were stabbed and about a dozen white pedestrians were robbed or beaten, some of them severely. At least ten shops were looted. Police made six arrests and shot one suspect in the leg.

Moloise had been convicted two years ago of murdering a black policeman. The victim, Warrant Officer Philippus Selepe, 52, was slain with an automatic weapon outside his home near Pretoria in 1982. Moloise at first confessed to the crime but later recanted, charging police coercion. Later he said he had been involved in planning the ambush, but only because he was afraid that his associates in the African National Congress would kill him if he did not cooperate. The A.N.C., for its part, has insisted that its guerrillas, not Moloise, committed the murder. Moloise was, however, a firm supporter of the A.N.C. and the violent overthrow of apartheid. As he once wrote: "A storm of oppression will be followed by the rain of my blood/ I am proud to give my life, my solitary life."

Following the execution, Mamike Moloise, 53, complained bitterly that she had been denied the opportunity to visit her son on the day of his death. "I begged," said the bereaved mother, who waited outside the prison gates accompanied by, among others, Winnie Mandela, wife of jailed A.N.C. Leader Nelson Mandela. "I said, 'It's the last time. That's my son.' This government is cruel. It is really, really cruel." Mrs. Moloise was later permitted to see her son's unopened coffin, but his body will remain the property of the state and will be buried inside the prison in a grave marked by a number.

Even before the hanging, violence had begun to boil up in other parts of the country. In Athlone, a colored (mixed-race) suburb of Cape Town, police and residents engaged in a rare gun battle at a local mosque; one colored man was killed and a white police sergeant seriously wounded. A few days earlier, security forces drove a truck through the suburb and, when a crowd began to throw stones at it, officers concealed in wooden boxes atop the vehicle suddenly emerged and fired shotguns into the crowd. Antiapartheid leaders denounced the decoy operation, which South African newspapers dubbed the "Trojan Horse" incident, and thousands of people turned out for the funeral of three youths slain in the fusillade. At week's end the government dispatched hundreds of security agents to keep the peace in Athlone.