End War Now, Mandela Tells Blacks : South Africa: At a mass rally, the ANC leader calls on factions to throw away their weapons.

DURBAN, South Africa —  Nelson R. Mandela, addressing a massive rally in a province devastated by a black civil war, pleaded Sunday for an end to factional fighting that has killed 3,000 in the last four years and now threatens South Africa’s peace process.

“My message is this: Take your guns, your knives, your pangas (machetes) and throw them into the sea,” the recently freed African National Congress (ANC) leader told more than 100,000 followers.

“Close down the death factories. End this war now,” Mandela demanded.

Mandela’s speech marked the beginning of a major effort by the ANC to heal the wounds of the brutal war waged by supporters and opponents of the ANC in dozens of villages and shantytowns scattered along 45 miles of rolling green hills near Durban.

The fraternal fighting has sharply divided several million Zulus, imperiling hopes of black unity as the country heads for black-white negotiations. It also has hampered President Frederik W. de Klerk’s reform initiatives by fueling white fears that violent internal clashes would beset any future government ruled by the country’s black majority.

Mandela, speaking from atop a 50-foot-tall tower, turned again and again in his 50-minute address to the need for peace in Natal province, which includes Durban, where the violence has destroyed family life and left tens of thousands homeless.

“As we stand together on the threshold of a new South Africa, Natal is in flames,” Mandela said. “Every family has lost a dear one in the fight.”

Mandela added that the violence was “my greatest burden, my deepest suffering” during the last three years in prison.

Many believe that the 71-year-old Mandela, whose personal popularity extends far beyond ANC supporters, is the only black leader in the country who can end the regional strife between followers of the ANC and of Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s more moderate Inkatha movement.

But the enormity of Mandela’s task was evident Sunday when he announced that the ANC is planning a meeting with Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini and Buthelezi. He added that “we extend the hand of peace to Inkatha and hope it might be possible to one day share a platform with Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.”

The mention of Buthelezi’s name drew loud murmurs of “No!” in the crowd.

But Mandela persisted, saying that the ANC condemns “the use of violence as a way of settling differences among our people.” He added that “none of the parties can be regarded as right or wrong.”

It will take more than strong words to resolve the simmering trouble in Natal, where neighborhoods are divided by their political allegiance and gangs armed with homemade rifles and spears attack and retreat in a continuing cycle of violence.

The day that Mandela was freed two weeks ago by South African authorities, Maria Kanyile heard screaming in her neighborhood of Mpumalanga, about 20 miles west of Durban. That’s how it always seems to begin, she says--with the screaming.

She grabbed her children and fled as a mob of about 200 people descended on her hilltop neighborhood. By day’s end, dozens of homes, a school and a church in her area had been burned. Twenty people were dead.

“Even now, right now as we talk, I worry about the safety of my children,” Kanyile, a mother of eight, said in an interview last week.

Heightened political tension surrounding Mandela’s release triggered renewed fighting in several townships in this region, and 50 people died within 48 hours of his release. In December, 1989, and January of this year, two of the bloodiest months in the history of the conflict, more than 300 people died in the fighting.

Most political analysts trace the fighting to 1986, when five students were killed at the University of Zululand by Inkatha supporters chanting the praises of Buthelezi. But analysts say the climate for the conflict was created by the apartheid system of racial separation, which has put pressure on both sides to increase their followings and also left the region ill-equipped to handle the spiraling population.

“This is the last cruel joke of apartheid,” said Paul Graham, head of the Durban office of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for South Africa. “It’s not because Zulus are warriors or because blacks are dictators who don’t know what democracy is. It’s because the whole system of apartheid has created a situation where everybody is so trapped that they can’t escape the violence.”

Of the 3.5 million people who live near Durban, 1.7 million live in tin shacks erected near established townships--and fewer than half of those makeshift homes have running water or power. Most of the shantytowns are Inkatha strongholds, while the nicer neighborhoods are controlled by supporters of the United Democratic Front (UDF) anti-apartheid coalition, which is aligned with the ANC.

Armed youth gangs from Inkatha, said to be led by some of Buthelezi’s ministers in his homeland government, and those from UDF areas periodically stage attacks on each other.

Both Mandela and Buthelezi have called for peace in the region, but neither has taken concrete steps to ease the bitterness. Some Inkatha supporters fear--and ANC supporters hope--that legalization of the ANC and Mandela’s freedom will strengthen the ANC.

“We are hoping Mandela will train the youth to be soldiers, to fight for the truth,” said Paulos Ngcobo, a pastor in Mpumalanga who has lost three sons in the violence.

Both sides are finding it difficult to persuade the youth to lay down their arms in the midst of the war.

Young people “have been the shock troops of our struggle, and we salute them,” Mandela told the crowd, some of whom carried wooden replicas of Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifles. “But they must now be disciplined. If they are not, we will lose the ground that we have gained at such cost.”

Inkatha and the ANC have been at odds since the 1970s, when Buthelezi, a former ANC member, split with the organization over its guerrilla war against Pretoria and its calls for economic sanctions.