Word: durbans
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...blazing sun and cloudless sky, Vincent Olebogeng strolls past an ore bucket spray-painted MERRY XMAS 86. Though the temperature is 87 degreesF, Olebogeng considers the weather cool relief. Thirty minutes earlier, he was two miles underground, moving tons of dusty gray ore in the almost unbearable heat of Durban Deep, a gold mine at Roodeport, ten miles west of Johannesburg. He has worked nearly 300 days in the past year, but he will not work tomorrow. After the paymaster hands him a brown envelope containing his monthly wages of 270 rand ($122), Olebogeng is ready to travel more than...
Olebogeng, who has worked at Durban Deep for five years, has been guaranteed a sixth. "Lucky for me," he said. "I have seven sisters and brothers to help feed." Despite the long hours and backbreaking work, the jobs are highly coveted. "We've turned away hundreds of applicants," said George Venter, personnel manager at Durban Deep, which employs 11,500 at Roodeport. Other miners have not been as lucky as Olebogeng. Faced with more than 700,000 unemployed blacks at home, South Africa is slashing the influx of migrants and hiring more locals. Cutting back jobs is also Pretoria...
...savings of 1,010 rand ($450). "Pick a goat," he said with glee, anticipating the feast to come. Meanwhile, his brother James, 13, popped a cassette into Vincent's battery- powered stereo. The sounds of the Isilingo Soul Brothers wafted over the plain. Vincent Olebogeng was home, and Durban Deep seemed very far away...
Even so, Asinamali!, for example, has been under constant threat. Apparently its angry art -- including a dead-on description of fire and bloodshed in a township attack -- too closely shadows life. One night, at a performance outside Durban, two busloads of counterrevolutionary blacks, armed with guns, spears and bush knives, drove up to the auditorium. They were looking for Ngema. The playwright was not in attendance, he recalls, "and the actors escaped death by inches, while the audience fled into the streets." The promoter of the company, says Ngema, was hacked to death...
...when it imposed emergency regulations on June 12. The first challenge concerned a detained black television sound man. A Transvaal Supreme Court ruled in July that the sound man had been arrested in bad faith, and ordered his release. A week later a three-judge Supreme Court panel in Durban set aside parts of the emergency regulations, charging that the sections dealing with "subversive statements" were a "lot of nonsense." Then came last week's ruling invalidating all detentions in parts of Natal province...