Word: pretoria
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...70th birthday last week in Pollsmoor Prison, outside Cape Town. Isolated from the other inmates, Nelson Mandela refused the government's offer of a special six-hour birthday visit from his family as a way of protesting the plight of thousands of black activists jailed in South Africa. Meanwhile, Pretoria ordered roadblocks around the prison and clamped down on tributes to Mandela, including outdoor meetings, a private tea party and a concert at the University of Cape Town, which ended with the arrival of riot police in gas masks...
Flying back to Pretoria from talks in Cairo, South African Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha was in high good humor. Jauntily donning a red fez, Botha told reporters that with the aid of Chester Crocker, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, negotiators from South Africa, Angola and Cuba had made progress on future discussions concerning the withdrawal of Cuban and South African troops from Angola. But the euphoria dissolved the following day, when new fighting broke out. Pretoria said that twelve of its soldiers and 300 Angolans and Cubans were killed when a government force attacked a South...
Mamelodi is a black township of more than 300,000 on the outskirts of Pretoria. At Smith's request, not only was he about to become its white minister, but also he and his wife Ellen would be its sole white inhabitants. The Afrikaners, among whom Smith had spent his whole life, have a harsh word for behavior like that: Kwaardwilligverlating , meaning, literally, "malevolent parting." Says Smith: "It isn't just a divorce. It means you leave someone with the intention of destroying them. You become an enemy...
Smith, 59, is by now fairly well accustomed to being treated as an enemy. No Pretoria parish in the Dutch Reformed Church has invited him to speak since he went to Mamelodi. People he thought were friends have turned away. There are telephone calls in the night. "Now that you're living with the Kaffirs," said one caller, "when we come to shoot them, we'll shoot...
...name means "place of melody" because a brook runs through the center of town, but there is nothing very melodious there. The government began building the township in the late '40s as a sort of dormitory-warehouse for black workers needed in Pretoria. The standard houses are four-bedroom huts, each with an outside water faucet next to the outdoor privy. For years the people shipped to Mamelodi were forbidden to own their homes or make improvements. That was supposed to make them look forward to eventual relocation to remote tribal homelands. Recently, the government has relaxed those restrictions; houses...