Word: bantu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Student power, in effect, rules Soweto today. Says David Thebehali, 37, who as chairman of the Urban Bantu Council (U.B.C.) serves as Soweto's unofficial mayor: "The parents were shocked at first by how the kids behaved during the riots. However, a lot of us soon realized that the students were only fighting the battles we should have fought years ago but didn't have the courage to fight. Now the parents solidly support the students, while they don't always agree with the tactics...
Soweto today is still pock-marked by the burned-out hulks of buildings destroyed in those riots. But Thebehali points out that, shebeens aside, virtually every damaged structure was a symbol of white control: Bantu administration offices, banks, schools, police stations. Useful facilities, like clinics, and privately run cultural centers, such as the Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A., were purposely spared. The "government claims that the violence and destruction here was mindless," says Thebehali. "But see for yourself what was burned and what wasn't. The kids knew what they were doing...
...known SSRC sympathizer, is on the run from the police and sleeps in a different house every night. "We know as well as they do that education is the tool of our liberation in the long run but not the second-class schooling we get under the Bantu Education Act. We must keep up the pressure to force the whites to give us the same education they have...
...Vorster salvage of the South African way of life? The right to remain in Africa, certainly: all parties acknowledge that, with their 300-year tradition in southern Africa, the Afrikaners and their latter-day countrymen, the English-speaking South Africans, have as much right to the land as the Bantu peoples who migrated down from the north...
...only relief from blackness and oppression is Soweto's social life. Community halls provide television, a relatively new feature in South Africa, but since programs are allwhite, they generate little interest. Instead, Soweto families prefer to visit a beer garden for "Bantu beer" (made of slightly fermented maize), or a shebeen (speakeasy) for stronger drink and the sensuous local music called patha patha. The shebeens, which sprang up because black men could not be served hard liquor legally, are still unlawful, but police tolerate them as pressure valves...