The South African government is waging a war against African neighbors as cruel and repressive as the policies it enforces inside its borders, a freelance journalist told an audience of 50 in Boylston Auditorium yesterday.

William Minter, a journalist currently affiliated with the African News, said that these wars against Angola and Mozambique have been neglected by the world media.

"Because these wars are little known, it is crucial to convey the facts," said Minter. In his talk, sponsored by Education for Action, the reporter said that Mozambique, since its founding, has been a target of rebels, funded, organized and led by South Africa.

"Mozambique came to independence in 1975 in a state of acute underdevelopment--with an illiteracy rate of over 90 percent" and is particularly susceptible to outside insurrection, Minter said.

Because Mozambique is a coastal nation, land-locked Black African countries, such as Zambia and Zimbabwe, depend on its ports for commercial contact, he said. It is to South Africa's economic and political advantage to disrupt routes of trade in Mozambique and appropriate commercial traffic for itself, the journalist said.

Before the lecture, Minter showed a 26-minute video entitled "Killing a Dream." The film focused on the South African government's support of RENAMO, the Mozambican resistance organization which Minter said terrorizes rural Mozambique in order to topple the nation's government. The film included candid footage of Mozambican villagers who had been multilated by RENAMO's armed supporters.

In a question-and-answer session after the film, Samuel Levy, who identified himself as a former correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal in Mozambique, said that "Killing a Dream" was itself a piece of "disinformation."

Levy said that the problems in that country do not all stem from South African intervention. Levy said that he had observed popular distrust of the Mozambique government's plans for collectivization and suggested that the mutilations shown in "Killing a Dream" might just as well have been "inside jobs" as the work of RENAMO guerillas.

Minter responded by saying that while there have been isolated examples of unaffiliated Mozambicans fighting against the government, the majority of such incidents have been the work of RENAMO.