Word: johannesburger
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Despite the Bantustans, the pass laws and the massive police organization, Africans are still flooding into the cities looking for work. The African townships surrounding Johannesburg now have a population of 650,000 (v. the city's 450,000 whites). And, for all the restrictions, the regime does not seriously try to stop the flood. The whites cannot get along without them...
...wait on white customers in Johannesburg department stores, serve as typists, cashiers and bookkeepers for commercial firms, work beside whites at the lathes in auto plants and steel mills. The nation's gold mines are negotiating with the white miners' union for permission to put blacks into 2,000 skilled jobs that are now vacant. Africans have already taken over more than 10,000 traditionally white jobs on the government railroads, and are rapidly replacing whites behind the wheels of heavy trucks...
Verwoerd's regime has spent millions of dollars moving Africans out of Johannesburg's squalid shantytown "locations" and into new government housing in townships farther from the city. It has also built hundreds of schools, can point to the fact that the African literacy rate has nearly doubled in the past decade. But, points out a Johannesburg professor, "relative to its resources, South Africa does less for the African than any other country...
...cities echo with the laughter of Africans, and the townships rock to the Beatle beat of guitars, strummed by young men wearing the cowboy hats that have become the latest rage. But all too often the smiles hide resentment. Says one African: "If I walk in the streets of Johannesburg and a white man kicks me, I will grin and say, 'Baas, you would have made a great soccer player.' But there is murder in my heart. I wear different masks for different white people all the time...
Many whites, of course, are opposed to apartheid; in 1960 Verwoerd survived an assassination attempt by an anti-apartheid white farmer who shot him in the ear and jowl at a Johannesburg cattle show. But the opposition