Word: langa
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...bleak ironies were piled high on a country already burdened with too many. Last Thursday marked the 25th anniversary of the massacre at Sharpeville, when police killed 69 blacks in the township 40 miles south of Johannesburg. That watershed conflict was still a vivid memory to many blacks in Langa, another township 25 miles from the southeast coastal city of Port Elizabeth. There, crowds defied a government ban on public gatherings to hold a procession in honor of three blacks who had been killed in clashes with police the previous weekend...
Before long the procession became a protest march, and the protest a confrontation. As up to 4,000 demonstrators strode along the highway between Langa and the white town of Uitenhage, their path was blocked by 19 policemen. Through a loudspeaker, the young lieutenant in charge of the patrol, Johannes Fourie, told the protesters to go home. They continued to push forward. A policeman fired a warning shot at the feet of the group's leaders. Still they advanced. With that, Fourie ordered the police to open fire on the marchers. At least 19 blacks were killed...
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...
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...