Word: johannesburgers
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...Administration supports and considers to be a partial vindication of its policy of constructive engagement, were too much for Afrikaner hard-liners but not nearly enough for black political leaders of any persuasion. Unhappily for the government, the reforms coincided with a deepening economic crisis, the worst, in some Johannesburg analysts' view, since 1929. The price of gold, which provides more than 50% of South African export earnings, has held stagnant since 1983, and inflation (now 16%) and unemployment (estimated at 8.4% among the work force) were on the rise. The recession hit blacks hardest, and under the twin pressures...
...Cape Town, seat of the legislature, colored and Indian M.P.s shout their disapproval of apartheid within the new tricameral Parliament. In Johannesburg, black and white traffic cops wear the same black serge, receive the same salary and hand out the same tickets. Until ten years ago, television was not permitted by a government that regarded it as immoral and dangerously subversive. Today whites watch The A Team and The Bill Cosby Show and buy Mr. T dolls for their children...
Nonetheless, one aspect of their lives has changed hardly at all. South African whites rarely if ever visit black townships and have only the vaguest idea of what life in them is like. Says a Johannesburg travel agent: "Foreign visitors who take the scheduled bus tour to Soweto," the sprawling black township southwest of Johannesburg, "know more about the place than do most of the city's whites." Those tours were temporarily canceled a fortnight ago after a bus carrying American, German and British tourists was stoned by youths...
...lives of tens of thousands of blacks and whites remain intertwined. Every weekday a black woman in her early 60s, whose first name is Aletta, goes from her home in Soweto to the Parkwood suburb of Johannesburg, where she works half a day for a white family. She is one of thousands of black women who work in white homes and provide the main income for their families. She has been a domestic servant in white households for most of her life. Her husband is dead, and she lives in a four-room house with her three daughters...
Since blacks are not allowed to vote, nobody knows for certain how popular the A.N.C. is among them, but it is generally assumed that the organization enjoys considerable strength with young activists in the Johannesburg and Eastern Cape townships. Four years ago, a poll by the English-language Johannesburg Star indicated that 40% of blacks in the major cities would vote for the A.N.C. and 76% considered Mandela the most popular political leader. A survey last March by City Press, a black newspaper in Johannesburg, also put Mandela...