Word: soweto
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Student power, in effect, rules Soweto today. Says David Thebehali, 37, who as chairman of the Urban Bantu Council (U.B.C.) serves as Soweto's unofficial mayor: "The parents were shocked at first by how the kids behaved during the riots. However, a lot of us soon realized that the students were only fighting the battles we should have fought years ago but didn't have the courage to fight. Now the parents solidly support the students, while they don't always agree with the tactics...
Although born and bred in Soweto, Thebehali is not popular there because he is an appointee and therefore considered a stooge of the white government in Pretoria. But he is doing his best to improve essential services in Soweto. Last 26 week Thebehali joined the mayor of Johannesburg in establishing a fund, targeted at $115,000, to help rebuild some of the facilities destroyed last June...
...Soweto today is still pock-marked by the burned-out hulks of buildings destroyed in those riots. But Thebehali points out that, shebeens aside, virtually every damaged structure was a symbol of white control: Bantu administration offices, banks, schools, police stations. Useful facilities, like clinics, and privately run cultural centers, such as the Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A., were purposely spared. The "government claims that the violence and destruction here was mindless," says Thebehali. "But see for yourself what was burned and what wasn't. The kids knew what they were doing...
That role is filled at the moment by the SSRC. Since the June riots, it has three times tried to force Soweto's 250,000 workers to stay home in a show of solidarity with student protests, but with only limited effect. Too many Sowetoans live too close to poverty to risk losing even a day's pay. The current mourning campaign has been more successful. SSRC plans its next show of strength this week, when Soweto's schools are scheduled to reopen. It has vowed to keep the township's 180,000 children home to protest the poor quality...
Last week the government promised free textbooks for most black schoolchildren by 1978, and Soweto's parents and "Mayor" Thebehali hope the students will relent and drop the boycott. But SSRC is adamant. "We understand our parents' anguish," says a Soweto high school senior named Michael, who, as a known SSRC sympathizer, is on the run from the police and sleeps in a different house every night. "We know as well as they do that education is the tool of our liberation in the long run but not the second-class schooling we get under the Bantu Education...