Word: evaton
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...last week's troubles was not explicitly racial. The government had recently announced an increase in rents and electricity rates in the black townships, enraging local residents, who complain that they are already hard pressed. But other, more specifically political motives may also have been involved. In Evaton township, for instance, 45 Indian shops and houses were burned to the ground, leading to speculation that blacks were furious about Indian participation in the recent parliamentary elections. As it happened, fewer than 20% of the country's registered Indian voters and only 30% of the mixed-race voters...
...arrested. In a few spots, the turnout was impressive. At Orlando township in the outskirts of Johannesburg, 20,000 Africans milled around the police station, led by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, 36, a Methodist-reared university instructor, who heads the Pan-African Congress. Fifteen miles to the south, in Evaton, 70,000 Africans turned out. The nervous police made few arrests of the demonstrators; at Langa, near Cape Town, they opened fire to disperse the Africans, killing three and wounding...
...week after week and year after year, the Negroes of sprawling Evaton left their slum location to climb aboard the buses of the Evaton Passenger Bus Service and ride to their jobs in the big factories of Vereeniging, Vanderbijl Park and Johannesburg. Then, a year ago, the white-owned bus company raised its fare. Thousands of Evaton's commuters began riding bicycles, forming car pools in native-owned cabs, or taking the slower railroad to work. As the boycott spread (as bus boycotts spread in the U.S.−see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), those who persisted in paying the higher...
Last week the tension over the bus fares exploded in an orgy of uncontrolled rioting. Opposing factions, organized into fighting impis (regiments), battled it out in the streets of Evaton for three days. Some 2,000 terrified women of the district hastily gathered up their children and their household goods and fled to the police barracks, where they set up a refugee camp, while police reinforcements from a dozen nearby cities fought the rioters with Sten guns and fell back in confusion before the wildly swinging clubs of the mobs. Four more Africans were killed and a score hospitalized...
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