Word: soweto
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...Rankuwa Township, 8 a.m. Thami Mcerwa, 27, president of the Azanian Youth Organization (AZAYO) -- Azania is what his movement would rename South Africa -- is preparing for another day's work in "the struggle." He spent the night as he usually does: in a four-room matchbox house in Soweto that he shares with his mother, brother and two sisters. Then he made the 50-mile journey north in his battered green Toyota to this black ghetto outside Pretoria...
Mcerwa's hero is Steve Biko, the black nationalist leader whose 1977 death in police custody turned him into the country's most celebrated black martyr. At 12 Mcerwa joined the 1976 Soweto uprising, the landmark outbreak of racial violence in which more than 100 blacks were killed. As he ran home after being teargassed, an older student who had been his political mentor was gunned down by the police...
Together with leader Eugene TerreBlanche, Rudolph founded the A.W.B. in 1973. The most important of its objectives, he maintains, is the re- establishment of an Afrikaner nation in the Transvaal and Orange Free State provinces. Either large townships like Soweto would be partitioned out of the white state, or else blacks would simply have to accept white domination without complaint...
...Mcerwa has arrived back in Soweto for another organizational meeting. At a small dwelling that doubles as a comrade's home and an AZAYO branch office, he runs into Khosto Seathlolo, a leader of the 1970s' student protests who was sidelined by a long prison sentence. "He is one of our famous activists," Mcerwa explains. "No, Thami," Seathlolo replies. "You young guys are going to be the heroes...
Moreover, his experiences travelling around the globe, from Belfast to Soweto to Albuquerque, have given Coles what he describes as a "wisdom." Speaking of the people he describes in his work The Old Ones of New Mexico, Coles recalls, "Many times my wife and I would sit with some of these elders in those small villages and think to ourselves, Lord if we could only have some of their thoughtfulness and goodhumor and stoic endurance and decency, then we'd be doing well...