S.A. violence shows itself to envoy

Press, 14 January 1986, Page 6

S.A. violence shows itself to envoy

NZPA-Reuter Johannesburg

An American envoy, Chester Crocker, had a brush with the political violence sweeping South Africa when a black community leader he was to meet was killed by political opponents.

Mr Crocker, the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, was to have met Ample Mayisa, aged 58, during a tour of black townships near Johannesburg yesterday. Relatives said Mayisa was attacked the night before by a group of conservative youths. The police said

they found his body yesterday in the township of Leandra, east of Johannesburg. He had been stabbed and burned, they said. “It was terrible that this should happen,” Mr'Crocker said. He will meet the Foreign Minister, Mr Pik Botha, and possibly President Pieter Botha, to discuss the future of the South African-ruled territory of Namibia (South West Africa) and the civil war in Angola. Mr Crocker’s visit to the townships was a departure from his normal routine of talks with the Government. In Duduza township, he

spoke to the wife of a community leader, Joseph Thobela, who is in detention without trial under the Government’s emergency powers designed to end rioting. Selina Thobela described how their two daughters—one of them pregnant—were killed in a firebomb "attack on their home last May. •-= _ ’ Townships such as Duduza have been among the worst affected by rioting during anti-Government protests in the last two years, in which more than a thousand people have been killed.