Word: sophiatowner
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...last week, thousands of Johannesburg policemen-the whites armed with Sten guns and rifles, the blacks with clubs and spears-filed out of their barracks and drove in 300 trucks to a narrow strip of grassland that separates the white suburb of Westdene from the crowded Negro slum of Sophiatown. The cops marched quietly into the sleeping warren. Every 20 yards a policeman took up station. "We mustn't waken these bloody Kaffirs," warned one officer. "We'll shock them well enough after daylight...
Operation Sophiatown was neither a pogrom nor a Mau Mau roundup. It was the South African government's new, efficient way of enforcing its policy of apartheid (racial segregation). An all-African community with shops, churches and the only swimming pool for African kids in Johannesburg, Sophiatown is one of three "black spots" on the western side of the city, which the government has recently zoned as "predominantly European." For whites and Negroes to live in such close proximity strikes South Africa's Boer Nationalists as improper and possibly sinful...
...came three days earlier than expected, and was accompanied by a ban on all public gatherings, political or religious, of twelve or more people. "There is reason to apprehend a feeling of hostility," explained the Minister of Justice. But Father Trevor Huddleston, the gentle Anglican missionary who serves Sophiatown's needy, defiantly held his regular church services...