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Virtually on the eve of Prime Minister Vorster's flight to West Germany for a meeting with Secretary of State Kissinger, the racial tensions that seethe just beneath the surface of South African life exploded in Soweto, a ramshackle, overcrowded satellite town for blacks on the outskirts of Johannesburg. In three bitter days and nights of wild rioting and skirmishes between club-wielding, stone-throwing blacks and heavily armed police, at least 100 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured; only a handful of the victims were white. The turmoil spread to at least seven other...
Some witnesses claimed that police had provoked the conflict. A black reporter for the Johannesburg Star saw a police officer pick up a stone and hurl it into the crowd. Then, he said, "some students began picking up stones. Shouting 'Amandhla [power],' they moved haltingly toward the police. A black police sergeant was explaining to a group of parents that there would be no trouble, that the children weren't fighting, when an officer opened fire...
Even on Friday night−payday−there's not much to enjoy in Soweto. Into a 35-sq.-mi. area are packed perhaps a million people−650,000 by official count−and life is hard and bleak. Soweto is Johannesburg's Harlem, a black ghetto that has sprawled into the country's fourth largest city...
Very little is pretty about Soweto, not even the name (which rhymes with potato). It derives from no tribal dialect but from "southwestern township," its location, eight miles southwest of the larger white city. Soweto is actually a black bedroom community for Johannesburg. Most of the adults commute daily aboard crowded, segregated trains to jobs in the city. Few whites return the visits. To enter Soweto, a white person must obtain a special permit good only for daylight hours, a day at a time...
...available to supervise the shebeens or control the populace. Thugs known as tsotsis prowl the streets, particularly on payday, to mug hapless passersby. With murders running at the rate of 1,000 a year, the all-black Soweto urban council (which advises on Soweto affairs for the all-white Johannesburg city council) has called for vigilante patrols...