Word: soweto
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...Soweto's Black Christmas and all its trimmings were planned-and enforced -by a secretive, emergent political force of students, largely of high school age. Officially they are known as the Soweto Students Representative Council (SSRC), but they are described simply, by themselves and by the older blacks of Soweto, as "The Children." They are, in fact, the dominant, virtually unrivaled political power within Soweto. TIME Johannesburg Bureau Chief William Me Whirter spent two weeks in the township, observing the mood a year later and The Children in action. His report...
...Soweto's Children have come to rule the township with a mixture of brutality and bold authority that both fascinates and frightens their elders. These junior enforcers have capitalized on their legacy as the heirs of the martyred youths who led last June's upheaval, and on a general sense of despair and futility within the urban community. "We may still be children," one of their leaders says, "but politically we have been through very much." The Children are now seeing to it that almost everyone else in Soweto follows their lead...
During the past year, The Children have taken command over Soweto's schools, usurping classrooms for their own closed strategy sessions and then sending home their instructions for community action against the government through an army of student recruits. Says a black parent: "My twelve-year-old comes in and warns me that if I go to work, 'we shall assault you.' We. Can you imagine that...
...Life. Despite that vacuum, despite the black opposition that still exists, there is no question that the youths have captured Soweto-partly on their own, partly because their elders failed to lead. And the townships will never be the same. True, some aspects of the old Soweto still exist: the neatly kept gardens of middle-class black homes; the Dube Lawn Bowls Association, whose members still gather every Sunday in their English whites; the Zionists, an Africanized Christian sect, famous for their daylong religious dances that begin at prayer services in backyard tents on Saturday nights...
More important, though, are the signs of a new kind of life in Soweto, a spirit that is not limited to political consciousness. Despite the poverty and the joblessness, there are small tokens of enterprise in the townships. Residents are buying hulks of old cars to start their own jitney taxi service. Women are organizing neighborhood communal food-growing projects and day-care centers. People are buying transistors, tape decks and television sets, as if suddenly eager to latch onto a few small pleasures of life. There is champagne in the shebeens, and the chef in Soweto...