Word: africa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...effect of the vast complex of apartheid laws is often ridiculous. The Japanese, who trade heavily with South Africa, are officially classified as "whites"; East Indians, who are descended from Caucasian stock, are '"Asians." A Greek immigrant from Cyprus was nearly refused entrance to South Africa recently because he had acquired a deep suntan on the ship. Since white athletes are forbidden to compete against nonwhites, South Africa has had to cancel its longstanding rugby rivalry with New Zealand-which allows Maoris to play on its team...
...reason is economic. South Africa is in the middle of a massive boom. Attracted by cheap labor, a gold-backed currency and high profits, investors from all over the world have plowed money into the country, and the new industries that they have started have sent production, consumption-and the demand for labor-soaring...
Verwoerd often boasts that the blacks of South Africa are better off than anywhere else on the continent. Economically he is right. What with decent paychecks (minimum daily wage for an unskilled laborer is $2.80) and easy credit, many an urban African can afford to buy imbuia wood furniture for his dining room, neat school uniforms for his children, and in some cases even a car for himself. Every year countless thousands of blacks from nearby countries flood into the republic looking for work-and the bright lights of the city life...
...squalid shantytown "locations" and into new government housing in townships farther from the city. It has also built hundreds of schools, can point to the fact that the African literacy rate has nearly doubled in the past decade. But, points out a Johannesburg professor, "relative to its resources, South Africa does less for the African than any other country...
...white people are happy with Verwoerd's state of affairs. There is a vocal minority of racists even more extremist than he is, who accuse him of doing too much for the "bloody kaffirs." His regime is widely criticized, moreover, for its refusal to allow television in South Africa-a restriction in tended both to keep out foreign "liberalist" programs (such as I Spy) and to protect the Afrikaans language against the incursions of English (there are no packaged shows in Afrikaans). A recent opinion poll showed that two-thirds of all white South Africans want TV, but Minister...