Word: johannesburgers
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...early as 6 a.m., the streets of Soweto were mobbed with mourners determined to bury their dead. Militant black youths roamed the sprawling township outside Johannesburg, enforcing a work stoppage that had been called to honor the 24 Sowetans felled a week earlier by police gunfire. Wielding sjamboks, or plastic whips, the young radicals chased commuters from bus stops and train stations and pelted moving vehicles with rocks. One bus was halted and burned on the spot. Security forces moved in rapidly, spraying the streets with tear gas. By 10 a.m., thousands of blacks had congregated outside the locked gates...
...police asked the families of the dead to sign a paper agreeing to these rules. The families refused. Police then went to the area's mortuaries and warned undertakers not to release any bodies for burial without official permission. When a priest filed an urgent court petition in Johannesburg to have the orders set aside, the request was denied. Undeterred, the families and antiapartheid organizations pushed ahead with plans for the funeral...
Even in South Africa, a country that has become almost numbed to racial violence, it was a night to remember -- or to try to forget. In Soweto, the sprawling African township (pop. 2 million) outside Johannesburg, three Land Rovers full of police pulled up to a burning roadblock constructed of garbage cans, tires, logs and scrap metal. Along the barricade stood a crowd of angry youths. Some Sowetans claim that the trouble actually started two hours earlier, when police broke up a meeting called to discuss the threatened eviction of people who were refusing to pay their rent. The government...
...councils have responsibility for collecting rents and providing housing, electricity, water, sanitation and other services. When costs went up, the councils hiked the rents, and the townships rebelled. In September 1984, a rent strike in some of the townships to the south of Johannesburg marked the beginning of the current period of nationwide unrest...
Aware of the problem, the Soweto council has set up an office in Johannesburg, where township residents can supposedly pay the money without intimidation. But even those who would prefer to do this have heard rumors that such offices are full of spies for the comrades back home, and so in many cases they do nothing. For others, the issue is not just the rent but the sense of being forced to pay tribute to support the apartheid system...