Word: soweto
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Even in South Africa, a country that has become almost numbed to racial violence, it was a night to remember -- or to try to forget. In Soweto, the sprawling African township (pop. 2 million) outside Johannesburg, three Land Rovers full of police pulled up to a burning roadblock constructed of garbage cans, tires, logs and scrap metal. Along the barricade stood a crowd of angry youths. Some Sowetans claim that the trouble actually started two hours earlier, when police broke up a meeting called to discuss the threatened eviction of people who were refusing to pay their rent. The government...
...power of black unions has been demonstrated twice in recent months. Union-backed "stay-aways" on May 1 and again on the June 16 anniversary of the 1976 Soweto riots succeeded in halting most South African business and industrial activity. Continuing wildcat strikes throughout the country have also contributed to a growing sense of unease in the South African business community. Now COSATU has called for another "day of action" this week, testing the government's mettle with yet another nationwide strike...
...flow of information and reports out of South Africa, Americans will be deprived of the vivid pictures and descriptions of violence and protest which egg them on to protest. Congressional interest will dwindle without such public pressure--to the delight of the Pretoria government. As after the Sharpville and Soweto riots, South Africa is plotting to gain time out of the limelight to lick its wounds and quell internal and external dissent...
...antiapartheid activists. At least 32 people were killed, and tens of thousands of shacks were burned, reputedly by the vigilantes, leaving as many as half of the settlement's 100,000 residents without shelter. There were riots in at least 15 other places, including the huge black township of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, where police clashed with a crowd of 8,000 who had gathered to attend a funeral that the government had declared illegal. All told, the number of South Africans killed in disturbances over the past 20 months, almost all of them black, is approaching 1,600. Late...
...Lusaka, the exiled A.N.C. leader Oliver Tambo, who has been running the organization ever since his friend Mandela went to prison in the early 1960s, called on South African blacks to give their full support to a national strike on June 16, the tenth anniversary of the uprising in Soweto. Declared Tambo: "Let every university and school be emptied of its youth. Let every mine, factory, farm and white home be without labor. Let every shop close its doors." With emotions running so high on both sides, and with both camps showing signs of fracturing under the pressure, any hope...