Word: johannesburgers
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...Just like the old days," muttered a grizzled Zulu elder in Johannesburg's Soweto. Standing in a dusty street one day last week, he recalled with a mixture of admiration and apprehension the legendary days of the 19th century wars against the whites by South Africa's largest and fiercest tribe (see box below). This time, however, the target of the angry Zulus in Soweto was the black militants-the student leaders and other activists who were leading a three-day boycott to prevent Soweto's 250,000-member black labor force from going to work...
...started early in the week when Soweto's young militants, in an effort to sustain the black demonstrations against racial discrimination, called on all Soweto workers to stay home from their jobs in Johannesburg for three days. With leaflets, with placards, with shouted threats, they warned everyone to support the strike or pay the consequences. "Give our regards to your white masters," one worker on his way to Johannesburg was told. "We'll be waiting for you tonight." On the first day, about 40% of Soweto's work force stayed home...
...safety of "white" Johannesburg, employers declared that the boycott had been largely ineffective. No vital services had been disrupted, and only about a third of the Soweto work force had stayed home for all three days. Some employers considered docking the pay of absentees, but others urged their colleagues not to retaliate in any way. "A money-earning black is a happy black," counseled one executive. "Deprive him of livelihood, and you lose a potential ally when the crunch comes...
Similarly, some whites exulted that the anti-white thrust of the black activists in Soweto had been blunted by the Zulu warriors. Others knew better. "Sooner or later they'll get back to confronting the white Establishment," observed a white businessman in Johannesburg. "When they do, it will be much worse than before. Right now the problem is tribal, but in the long run it's strictly racial." He concluded by citing the statistic that no white man in South Africa ever needs to be told: the country has 18 million blacks and only 4 million whites...
Next day some 1,000 blacks rushed the Langa police station. The police again opened fire and killed at least two more people. Other demonstrators set up roadblocks and stoned trains and buses to prevent workers from going to their jobs in Cape Town. There, as in Johannesburg's Soweto, the tactic failed to disrupt business and industry seriously, but managed to intimidate many black workers. As one Johannesburg worker told Lee Griggs, TIME'S Africa bureau chief: "They scare me. This morning some young ones tried to make me stay in Soweto...