Word: pretoria
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...from witnesses that the Information Department had illegally financed the start of a pro-government Johannesburg daily, the Citizen, and allegations of personal abuse of the fund amounting to millions of dollars. To angry opposition members of Parliament, the judge's ouster amounted to an attempted cover-up of Pretoria's "Watergate." In protest, they refused to accept appointments to a special bipartisan investigative body. Indeed, there is intense pressure on Botha within his own party not to suppress such evidence...
...were also involved. Robert Smit and his wife Jeanne-Cora were discovered in their home near Johannesburg, fatally wounded by guns and knives. Bloody slogans had been scrawled across the walls of the house, apparently to disguise the killings as the work of terrorists or a religious cult. The Pretoria rumor mill now has it that Smit, a financier by profession, had uncovered evidence of irregularities in foreign exchange transactions, and was murdered in order to keep him quiet...
...Africa's last hold-out against Marxism, in an effort to woo American support for their position. Always they ask, both blacks and whites, what the U.S. will do when it comes down to the wire, whether it will intervene, and on which side. Cyrus Vance is in Pretoria this weekend discussing Namibia, so the question is particularly relevant. Unfortunately, I can't answer; neither could he, probably. If South Africa is liberated, the whole western economic structure is likely to change drastically, and it isn't clear to anyone the U.S. won't end up joining South Africa...
...laws to keep South Africans from thinking. The censor's list is long and strict, and the newspapers have to tread carefully when they cover current events. Often the censors are fairly arbitrary, as in one famous case, when they banned Black Beauty (because of its title). While in Pretoria, I realize I have a banned novel in my suitcase, Alex LaGuma's Fog at the Season's End. For a moment, I feel as if the whole South African security force is about to knock on the door; reassured, I realize I am only liable to a $650 fine...
...Middelburg, a small town outside Pretoria, two small boys run up to wash the windows of the car, hoping to get a few cents for their efforts. They wipe the window furiously with a cloth only slightly more ragged than their clothes; this five cents means a lot to them. Times are bad now for black South Africans. Unemployment has reached an all-time high, though no one has exact figures; and there is no minimum wage for most of the jobs blacks can do. 80 per cent of black South Africans fall below the poverty datum line, the absolute...