Twelve worshipers were killed and more than 50 were wounded by gunmen during an attack on Sunday night at St. James Church near Cape Town.
Absurdly, the first notion that came to Kara-Anne Harris on Sunday night as the killers kicked in the door of St. James Church and blasted worshipers with automatic-rifle fire and grenades was that they were after the Russians. If St. James is a symbol of anything, it may be a kind of openhearted evangelical hospitality, extended to squalid black shacktowns of nearby Khayelitsha township and to homesick fishermen from visiting Russian trawlers.
There were 140 of the seamen sitting with the multiracial congregation at the 7 P.M. service, listening happily to a duet of the gospel tune "More Than Wonderful," when the gore and splinters of pews began to fly. "I wonder if it's because we have Russians in our church," Miss Harris remembered thinking for a moment, before recalling the end of the cold war and chiding herself, "Oh goodness, that would be old." This war, she realized, is against her, people like her, and their half-realized dream of South Africa's future.
The attack, which left 12 worshipers dead (including 3 of the hapless Russians) and more than 50 wounded in the cozy Cape Town suburb of Kenilworth, was the most horrific in the eight months since the opening of a mysterious terrorist war on white suburbia. Except that the killers were black and very efficient, little is known for certain about their identities or motives, leaving white South Africa to its fearful speculations: black militants, hired guns, rogue police or perhaps, as the Rev. Ross Anderson surmised, some diabolical "blood lust" beyond politics.
The killing of people at prayer stunned South African whites with a fresh premonition of the carnage they expect en route to the country's first universal elections next April. But if, as many assumed, the carnage was intended to frighten South Africa off its course of negotiated change, it seemed likely to have just the opposite effect. Negotiators laboring over a constitution say each massacre is another reminder that only a credible, elected government stands a chance of restoring order.
St. James is a congregation more of the future than of the past. It has welcomed worshipers of all races for all of its 25 years, even when the mixed-race residents known as coloreds were being forcibly expelled from the neighborhood in the years of apartheid. The congregation Sunday included whites and blacks, and parishioners of mixed race and Indian heritage. Since President F. W. de Klerk renounced segregation three years ago, the neighborhood and the church have grown more diverse: Miss Harris, a 21-year-old student of English and drama, said her church youth group is two-thirds nonwhite. "It's a place where I feel at home," said Lorenzo Smith, a parishioner of mixed race whose wife died of a shrapnel shard to the heart even though he was sprawled on top of her in the aisle.
The church belongs to a breakaway Anglican denomination that split with the Church of England in the last century and now practices fervent, missionary evangelism. The onslaught Sunday night followed the pattern of other killings in attacks that have laid waste to a golf club, a family steak restaurant, commuters driving their children to school and a hotel bar. A black man in blue overalls burst through the door of the modern pentagonal church and sprayed the pews with an R-4 automatic rifle, the standard military weapon in South Africa and its black homelands.
Then a second assailant stepped up and rolled a grenade beneath the pews -- "like he was bowling," Sean Savage recalled. It exploded under a row of Russian sailors, blowing the legs off one of them and leaving a small crater in the blue carpet. Someone lofted a second grenade into the back rows. This being gun-saturated South Africa, few among the 1,300 worshipers were surprised when one of their number pulled a pistol from the holster tucked in his blue jeans and fired back. He chased the killers out and watched them peel way in an old green Mercedes Benz.
The church today looked like it had been hit by a blood storm. Blood smeared the pews and puddled on the carpet alongside a prayer book cleanly pierced by a single bullet. Outside, survivors filled the vacuum with theories. The leading candidate was the black radical fringe. Some of the earlier attacks on whites have been claimed by the guerrilla wing of the Pan Africanist Congress. Anonymous callers today both asserted and denied responsibility in the name of that organization.
This suggested, painfully, that the church might have been selected because of its outreach in the wretched township of Khayelitsha. An English missionary at St. James was shot in April while organizing a soccer game for children in the township. Others observed that the church -- English-speaking, multiracial -- would be a natural target for white Afrikaner fanatics or malcontents in the state security forces. Still others mused that the church was chosen, as terrorist targets often are, simply to announce that anyone, anywhere is vulnerable.
The images of blood-smeared Bibles may drive more whites to emigrate or seek the solace of the white separatist fringe. But among the parishioners of St. James, the fear was countered by resilience and resignation, some talk that God had ordained them to stay, and a much-discussed appreciation that this is what township blacks face routinely. Pastor Anderson, an intensely calm 35-year-old who last month turned down a minister's job in Raleigh, N.C., said he would do the same if the offer came today.
Jenny Johnston and her husband, Owen, said the subject of emigration had come up again. She said she was still haunted by "the smell of ammunition and damaged bodies," and was terrified for her three children, but was not yet willing to leave. "Even after last night's disaster, this is my country," she said.
Source: New York Times
