Word: durban
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Roving police squads sped through the main streets of Cape Town itself, swinging sjamboks (leather whips) and grabbing "intimidators" who, according to Justice Minister François Erasmus, "stood at street corners giving certain signs" to keep Africans from going to work. Near Durban, African stay-at-homes stoned and beat other natives returning from work in town. Black police carrying Zulu-style shields and assagais (short spears), moved in, killing four and wounding...
...hundreds of miles away in coastal Natal that the lightning struck next. Out from the tough slums of Cato Manor, the big African location near the lovely port city of Durban, surged three phalanxes of angry blacks waving ax handles and carrying stones. Two groups were turned back by armored cars bristling with fast-firing Bren guns. But the third column headed for Central Prison shouting, "Give us our leaders!" before the police could stop it. It moved swiftly up handsome West Street, busiest of the shopping boulevards. Suddenly the police were firing, and within minutes three Africans were dead...
Last June, the truncheons of 500 South African police beat down a native riot in Cato Manor, Durban's tin-roofed apartheid shantytown (four dead, 24 injured), and produced the kind of international story that the xenophobic South African government hates most to see in foreign print. Reading exported accounts of the riot, External Affairs Minister Eric Louw issued a threat of reprisal against "offending foreign newspaper correspondents who are not Union nationals." Last week. Louw's truncheon fell on a victim not only obscure but innocent. Peremptorily ousted from the Union of South Africa after eleven years...
Beyond labeling Barzilay "undesirable," the government refused to explain the deportation. Explanation was unnecessary. Day after the South African Information Office called Barzilay's wife to ask if he worked for NBC, Minister Louw pointedly observed in a speech that NBC coverage of the Durban riots was "especially bad." When the deportation order followed in due course, Barzilay protested that at the time of the riots he was not even in the country. The government rejected his appeal, gave him ten days...
After three days, the guns and fire hoses of 500 policemen finally brought peace to Durban. But just to make sure, the Union's Minister of Justice sent around three armored cars. In Cape Town, an M.P. rose to warn the government of South Africa about the dangers of tolerating such "rabbit warrens" as Cato Manor, where "23,000 Africans live under the most sordid conditions...