Word: soweto
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...early as 6 a.m., the streets of Soweto were mobbed with mourners determined to bury their dead. Militant black youths roamed the sprawling township outside Johannesburg, enforcing a work stoppage that had been called to honor the 24 Sowetans felled a week earlier by police gunfire. Wielding sjamboks, or plastic whips, the young radicals chased commuters from bus stops and train stations and pelted moving vehicles with rocks. One bus was halted and burned on the spot. Security forces moved in rapidly, spraying the streets with tear gas. By 10 a.m., thousands of blacks had congregated outside the locked gates...
Last week's violence in Soweto seemed virtually inevitable. Two days before the mourners gathered, authorities had announced restrictions clearly designed to derail township plans for a mass funeral for those who had died in the previous week's police crackdown on rent strikers. When outraged Sowetans defiantly ignored the ban, even sacred burial grounds were transformed into battlefields...
...moved in. New bursts of blinding gas forced the mourners to flee in all directions, for the moment leaving some of the coffins only half buried. The next day several of the remaining bodies were buried without incident. But the clash of wills between the police and many of Soweto's 2 million blacks is far from over...
...same day, another Soweto councilor, Siegfried Manthata, who heads a group dedicated to "crime control," fled with his family through his backyard and took refuge with neighbors after a mob stormed his house. The attackers hurled rocks through the windows, cut the phone line, doused the dwelling with gasoline and set it on fire...
...June, when the Pretoria government declared the national state of emergency, white officials predicted that the bloodshed that had wracked the country sporadically for almost two years would soon end. But last week's violence in Soweto appeared to demonstrate instead that the situation is taking a new and even more dangerous turn. It has deep roots in the townships where many of South Africa's 24 million blacks live, increasingly angry and frustrated not only at a repressive white government but at any of their neighbors who seem to tolerate...