Word: johannesburgers
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...Congress decided to exploit the passbook grievance. It urged Africans all over the Union to descend last week upon local police stations-without their passbooks, without arms, without violence-and demand to be arrested. In a few spots, the turnout was impressive. At Orlando township in the outskirts of Johannesburg, 20,000 Africans milled around the police station, led by Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, 36, a Methodist-reared university instructor, who heads the Pan-African Congress. Fifteen miles to the south, in Evaton, 70,000 Africans turned out. The nervous police made few arrests of the demonstrators; at Langa, near Cape...
...first, everything was relatively quiet, too, at the Sharpeville police station, 28 miles southwest of Johannesburg-but Sharpeville was soon to become a headline name the world over. Twenty police, nervously eying a growing mob of 20,000 Africans demanding to be arrested, barricaded themselves behind a 4-ft. wire-mesh fence surrounding the police station. The crowd's mood was ugly, and 130 police reinforcements, supported by four Saracen armored cars, were rushed in. Sabre jets and Harvard Trainers zoomed within a hundred feet of the ground, buzzing the crowd in an attempt to scatter it. The Africans...
...South Africa was stunned by the sudden bloodshed that had always been implicit in Verwoerd's unrelenting policies. The English-language Johannesburg Star assailed the government's "pathetic faith in the power of machine guns to settle basic human problems," and the Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg appealed "to all those in South Africa who have any human feelings" to stop the police tactics. More than 500 white students at the University of Natal, carrying banners reading HITLER 1939, VERWOERD 1960, assembled on campus to lower the British and South African flags to half-mast...
Even South Africa's rabidly nationalistic Afrikaans press was having second thoughts. The day before the riots, the Johannesburg Vaderland called for a "simpler and less hurtful pass system." The influential Cape Town Die Burger urged moderation on Prime Minister Verwoerd. But Verwoerd obstinately said that "nothing would be done" to abolish the pass laws, and belatedly discovered that the demonstrators at Sharpeville had "shot first," even though no one found arms on the Africans...
...slow burn began when Johannesburg's Golden City Post, most respected of the country's African newspapers, reported that there had been an earlier severe cave-in shortly before the big blast and rockfall. Some 40 miners scrambled for the safety of the lift cage. Half were forced back at the cage entrance, reported the Post; 20 others reached the surface but found their way blocked by supervisors who ordered them back into the tunnel. Two natives who refused to go back were clapped into the mine's own jail on charges of insubordination, said the Post...