A Senior Security Police Officer stated that more than 100 members of the ANC armed wing were awaiting trial in South Africa. They had been arrested over a period of several months, he said. There have been numerous guerilla incidents in South Africa reported during 1978.
The ANC said in Lusaka on 12 August that its guerillas had killed ten South African soldiers in a clash with the SA Defence Forces near Rustenburg, 75 miles west of Pretoria.
A communique said a small detachment of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the ANC, fought a four-hour battle with a unit of the SADF, reinforced by members of the national guard of Bophuthatswana. The ANC claimed the defence forces encircled the guerilla unit and sprayed the area with gunfire as well as napalm and defoliants.
The Johannesburg Citizen reported that "police from SA's elite Task Force and Counterinsurgency Unit, assisted by Bophuthatswana police, fought a running gun battle with a terrorist unit", and claimed that SA forces had captured one of the guerillas, but did not mention any casualties on the South African side.
This is the most serious clash yet reported which has occurred inside South Africa's borders. There have been reports of earlier clashes. In April Brigadier C. F. Zietsman, head of the Security Police, said police "had clashed several times with terrorists of the banned ANC in the eastern Transvaal", since June 1977. At least two policemen were reported wounded in these clashes. The Sunday Post reports that in a skirmish near the Swaziland border in late February a group of guerillas crossed into South Africa and ambushed a police patrol. Two policement were gunned down, and until mid April the incident was blanketed in secrecy while follow-up operations continued. The wounded policemen were treated at Nelspruit Hospital before being flown to Pretoria for further hospitalisation. The report states that "gangs based in Mozambique cross through Swaziland into the triangle of South African territory which is bounded by Mozambique and Swaziland. The area is mountainous and undeveloped and an ideal guerilla territory." Brigadier Zietsman said the ANC was concentrating on a double strategy of terror: "Using classic guerilla tactics it is attempting to involve as many security force units as possible in the rural areas, while sending small groups to the cities as well."
The Durban Sunday Tribune reported in late April that special police units deployed along vast stretches of the Transvaal borders with Swaziland, Botswana and Mozambique "are battling to contain a concentrated infiltration operation by the ANC military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe."
Brigadier Zietsman claimed a large number of armed guerillas had been captured attempting to make their way to the cities.
Guerilla attacks were reported in FOCUS 14 (p.8). Further sabotage attacks in urban areas have continued during 1978. A bomb exploded outside the headquarters of the Bantu Affairs Administration Board in Port Elizabeth on 10 March. A day earlier a man apparently blew himself up in Port Elizabeth carrying a bomb. Police later identified the man as Makwezi MacDonald Mtulu, and said he was a "close colleague and friend" of Steve Biko, the black consciousness leader who died in detention in September 1977. Police said Mtulu had been a medical student with Biko and that the two had worked together in SASO. Brigadier Johan Coetzee, deputy head of the Security Police, said that in 1972 Mtulu had fled South Africa to a foreign country and underwent military training Brigadier Coetzee said there was "positive proof" that the bomb blasts in Port Elizabeth and elsewhere were the work of the ANC. The Rand Daily Mail of 10 March reported that this was the "20th known bombing incident since the Carlton Centre bomb blast of 24 November 1977".
Also on 17 April Brigadier Zietsman disclosed that a State witness in the recently concluded Pretoria 12 ANC trial had been shot dead at his home in Soweto, killed by a shot fired from a Russian automatic pistol. He was Abel Mthembu, a former ANC member who had given evidence for the State at many ANC trials for over a decade, including at the Rivonia trial when Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment. His death follows the killing in September 1977 of Security Policeman, Det. Sgt. L. Nkosi, former ANC member who has given evidence for the State in several ANC trials.
Another former ANC member, also a State witness at several trials, was gunned down and seriously wounded at his home near Durban in January 1978. Newspaper reports blamed an ANC military unit for these shootings.
There have also been reports of bombs being discovered in buildings. For example, a 2.5 kg bomb made with Russian explosives was apparently found and defused 15 minutes before it was due to explode in the basement of the 22-storey Bosman building in central Johannesburg. Brigadier Coetzee said there was a link between the bomb in the Bosman building and a big propaganda campaign being conducted by the ANC. He said that ANC pamphlets urging violence and describing how to make bombs were being distributed in black townships throughout the country.
Several reports have appeared in the SA press of discoveries by the police of arms caches in both urban and rural areas.
In an interview at the beginning of June, Brigadier Zietsman said that of the young blacks who had fled the country after the uprisings which started in June 1976, 4000 were currently undergoing military training in guerilla camps. He estimated that 75% of these were in ANC camps, and that "most of the remainder" were in camps run by the PAC. Brigadier Zietsman warned that: "the danger must not be underestimated", and told white householders: "know what is going on in your own backyard."
Two black South Africans believed to be connected with the Bureau for State Security (BOSS) have been killed this year. In April a KwaZulu politician, 52-year-old Lloyd Ndaba, was assassinated in a hail of bullets fired by an unknown group of men outside his house in Meadowlands, Soweto. He was the head of the extreme right-wing "Shaka's Spear" party of KwaZulu, and had been accused of having BOSS connections. A black member of BOSS was found shot dead in a car near Durban in late July. He was 30-year-old Bhekithemba Mayeza. His body was found on the back seat with a bullet wound under the armpit.
On 25 June, 1978, a man described by the Rand Daily Mail as "Soweto's most feared policeman" was gunned down with a Russian Tokarev machine pistol outside his house in Soweto. Although described as a member of the Brixton Murder and Robbery Squad, he was, in fact, known as someone who had played a leading role in assaulting students and demonstrators arrested during the unrest of the last two years. The man was Det. Sgt. Orphan 'Hlubi' Chaphi.
