Word: langa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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EXACTLY 19 years ago today, thousands of unarmed South African demonstrators were protesting in Sharpeville and Langa against apartheid's passbook system when police suddenly opened fire on the crowds, killing 69 and wounding 186 others. The rallies against the hated pass laws were part of a nationwide protest campaign spearheaded by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). In the following weeks of protests, South African police killed another dozen blacks and injured hundreds more...
...another racial conflict in the black townships of white-ruled South Africa last week?all, that is, except one. This time blacks were fighting blacks, not whites, in an outburst of violence over the Christmas holidays that left at least 26 dead in three ghettoized Cape Town suburbs: Langa, Guguletu and Nyanga...
Black Power. The new fighting started in Langa township, outside Cape Town, the nation's second largest city, where several hundred black students marched out of the Langa high school, formed a phalanx on an adjoining athletic field and began chanting for "black power." Police, using bullhorns, warned them to disperse. The students answered with clenched-fist salutes and a barrage of rocks and bottles. Tear gas disrupted the demonstration, but not for long. Then the police turned fierce Alsatian dogs loose on the students. The police waded in after them for what one observer contemptuously called "a first...
Town, and the mob set afire more than a score of buildings-beer halls, liquor stores, schools, post offices-in Langa and two other townships. Several cars, too, were stopped, overturned and put to the torch. That was when the police started shooting. Twenty-seven people died that night...
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...