Word: johannesburger
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...black mayhem was a drive by young black students to expand further the power they have wielded in the ghettos since last June, when the bloodiest racial demonstrations in South African history shook the country. Back then it was Soweto, the huge (pop. 1.2 million), black suburb of Johannesburg, that erupted. The violence there, touched off by black anger over the forced use of the whites' Afrikaans language in black school instruction, spread rapidly. Since then, effective political power in Soweto, as well as some other black enclaves, has migrated to an underground organization of several hundred young blacks, known...
Although born and bred in Soweto, Thebehali is not popular there because he is an appointee and therefore considered a stooge of the white government in Pretoria. But he is doing his best to improve essential services in Soweto. Last 26 week Thebehali joined the mayor of Johannesburg in establishing a fund, targeted at $115,000, to help rebuild some of the facilities destroyed last June...
...since June, when he returned to Soweto--a black township outside Johannesburg--Qoboza's paper has taken increasingly vocal opposition to the government's policy of racial segregation, although The World has continued to advocate change through nonviolence...
Given the nature of his interaction with Vorster's government, it is not surprising that Matanzima himself is a rather unsavory character. The New York Times reported Sunday that the Sunday Timesof Johannesburg has accused the Transkei chief and his brother of corruption involving land deals between the chief and the party he controls; Matanzima responded with a rather vague statement, saying only that the allegations reflect the "deep-seated hatred these English jingoes have developed since we took over the Transkei...
Benjamin Pogrund wonders at this sort of fuss. In Johannesburg, South Africa, at The Rand Daily Mail (where Pogrund works as Associate Editor, third in command), decisions of this type--whether to or how much of a story to run, while trying to avoid a judicial run-in with the government--occur every day, and nobody bats an eyelash...