What was going on when I was born?

A car bomb exploded today outside the headquarters of the South African Air Force in Pretoria, killing at least 16 people and wounding more than 190. The Minister of Law and Order, Louis Le Grange, said he had no doubt that black guerrillas of the outlawed African National Congress, a major movement of resistance to white minority rule, were responsible for the blast. Officials described the explosion, which occurred at 4:30 P.M. at the height of the rush hour, as the biggest terrorist attack against the Government to date. No One Takes Responsibility There was no immediate confirmation from any of the African National Congress's offices outside South Africa that it had ordered the attack, and no one else claimed immediate responsiblity for it.

Mercenary waif, space maidens, cyborg villain. If that's your thing.

President Reagan, saying there were dangers in a ''Soviet-Cuban-Nicaraguan axis,'' warned Congressional critics of his Latin-American policy today that they risked leaving the hemisphere ''immobilized by fear or apathy.'' In a denunciation of ''the Soviets and their henchmen in Havana,'' the President told a cheering audience of Cuban expatriates that the outcome of his campaign for greater military and economic aid for Central America ''will shape America's image throughout the world.'' Praising the ''big stick'' philosophy of Theodore Roosevelt, Mr. Reagan said there were too many ''soft speakers'' today. 'Who Will Believe Us?'

The United States accused the Soviet Union today of killing hundreds and probably thousands of Afghan civilians through a series of bombing raids in Afghanistan in recent weeks. In one of the harshest statements issued by the State Department about Soviet actions, John Hughes, the spokesman, said the ruthlessness of the raids in and around the city of Herat and north and west of the capital, Kabul, were ''intolerable by any standard of civilized behavior.'' The statement said reliable reports continued to reach Washington ''of extremely heavy, brutal and prolonged Soviet and Soviet-mandated bombing of civilian areas within Afghanistan in recent weeks.'' Major Soviet Offensive ''These reports leave no room for doubt that casualties among the civilian population have been extremely heavy,'' Mr. Hughes said, reading the statement. ''It is not possible to measure precisely the extent of these casualties, but they certainly number many hundreds and are probably in the thousands.''

Benjamin L. Hooks has been indefinitely suspended as executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People by the organization's chairman, Margaret Bush Wilson, members of the association's board said yesterday. Mrs. Wilson, who has long been in a power struggle with Mr. Hooks, formally suspended him on Wednesday, A board member said Mrs. Wilson's authority to suspend Mr. Hooks had been affirmed at a meeting of the board's executive committee last week in Chicago. Mr. Hooks serves at the discretion of the group's 64-member board. Mrs. Wilson designated Thomas I. Atkins, the group's general counsel, as acting executive director until the board meets to resolve the issue. It was unclear what immediate effect the suspension would have on the daily operations of the association, the nation's oldest and largest civil rights group, which has its headquarters in Brooklyn Heights. Mr. Hooks declined to comment yesterday morning. An aide to Mrs. Wilson in St. Louis, where she practices law, said Mrs. Wilson was in Washington. Efforts to reach her for comment were unsuccessful.

Monthly rate increases of 16.5 to 21.8 percent for more than four million individual and small-group subscribers of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Greater New York and 730,000 elderly Medicare subscribers have been approved by the State Insurance Superintendent, his department said yesterday. The increases will add almost $300 million in revenue for Blue Cross. They take effect July 1 for current subscribers and immediately for new subscribers.

For decades the Youngstown area was at the center of the American steel industry. Furnaces and finishing mills lined the Mahoning River for 25 miles and were the bulwark of the economies of such communities as Warren, Niles, McDonald, Girard, Struthers and Youngstown. Today many of the plants are closed. Some have been demolished; the sites where huge furnaces and smokestacks once burned red at night are now large, empty, sun-baked fields, a bit of high plains inexplicably formed in a temperate zone.

The Senate vote for a budget resolution Thursday night marked the emergence of a centrist, bipartisan coalition that is no longer willing to follow President Reagan's lead on fiscal matters. Mr. Reagan probably commands enough support in both houses to sustain the vetoes he is likely to cast against spending and tax bills later this year. But he apparently lacks the backing to push through his own economic program, and his current legislative approach was described by Representative Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, as ''damage control.'' Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, the Senate Democratic leader, called the budget vote ''a victory for moderate Republicans and Democrats who believe the deficit ought to be lower.'' And Senator Lawton Chiles of Florida, the Budget Committee's ranking Democrat, added: ''The President can't completely have his way in the United States Senate now. He does need to consult with both sides.''

The White House today criticized as ''off target'' the Senate's newly passed bipartisan budget for 1984, which calls for tax increases President Reagan considers too high. At the same time, the Senate's chief tax writer, Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, predicted that Congress would refuse to vote taxes as high as those recommended by the Senate. Adopted shortly before midnight Thursday by a vote of 50 to 49, the budget calls for tax increases of $9 billion in the fiscal year 1984, $13 billion in 1985 and $51 billion in 1986. It also proposes $849.7 billion in spending and a deficit of $178.6 billion for 1984.

Amid driving rain and heavy security, Pope John Paul II today began the first papal visit to Milan since Pope Martin V came here in 1418.

Readers of People's Daily, accustomed to a diet of communiques, statistics and ideological exhortations, may have been jolted this month by the rare appearance of a story about a real event. Ever since a Chinese jetliner on an internal flight from Shenyang, Manchuria, to Shanghai was hijacked at gunpoint on May 5 and diverted to South Korea, China's Communist Party organ has provided a running, if selective, account of the ordeal of its passengers and crew and Peking's first formal contacts with Seoul, which it does not recognize diplomatically. Some Chinese have filled in the details by tuning in the Voice of America. But virtually everyone followed the hijacking, the first successful one of a Chinese airliner, though not always with due disapprobation. To the chagrin of their teacher, a few students in Peking said they admired the six hijackers, who wounded two crewmen in shooting their way into the cockpit, because, as one teen-ager put it, ''they showed guts.''

The Argentine military Government accused the major leftist faction of the Peronist party today of working closely with exiled leftist Montonero guerrillas. In a lengthy statement backed by photocopies of what were said to be guerrilla documents, the Government accused the faction, the Intransigence and Mobilization Movement, of intending ''to use coercive and violent means with the Montonero military apparatus.'' The statement said that the documents, many of them found after the slaying here three weeks ago of a guerilla leader, Clemente Raul Yaguer, indicated that attacks were being planned against centrist and rightist Peronist leaders. Among them were Angel Federico Robledo, a leading presidential aspirant for elections scheduled in October, and Saul Ubaldini, head of the General Confederation of Workers.