Word: soweto
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...Soweto's blacks insist that the death toll in their township alone last June was at least 350, or more than double the official toll of 168. (The government now admits that most of the officially dead were shot in the back.) Dozens of students are still detained under draconian security laws, and at least 1,000 others face trial on such catchall charges as causing public violence. Perhaps another 1,000 students, fearing further police pressure in the form of post-midnight security sweeps, have fled South Africa for neighboring Botswana and Swaziland...
...five months after the June riots, Soweto was off limits to white journalists; government officials insisted that their safety could not be guaranteed. Among the few who have been allowed into the township is TIME'S Africa Bureau Chief Lee Griggs. His report...
Christmas in Soweto this year was grimmer and even more subdued than usual. Workers, many of them living at or below the effective poverty line for South Africa's urban blacks, traditionally spend their modest year-end bonuses on a few toys, a bottle or two of brandy for a party, or perhaps a new piece of furniture for the drab little single-story brick houses in which they live...
...even the usual small pleasures have been denied to many Sowetoans this Christmas. The township is in unofficial mourning for its many hundreds of missing. The mourning period was mounted by students still at liberty in Soweto, as a mark of respect for their absent colleagues. After some initial resistance, Soweto's elders generally complied with leaflets distributed by SSRC calling for a moratorium on Christmas presents, parties, the exchange of greeting cards and any other outward sign of celebration. One group of students went so far as to break up a wedding ceremony as "inappropriate"; since then, many marriages...
Shut Up Shebeens. There is another reason why there was less heavy drinking in Soweto this Christmas?government-owned beer halls and liquor stores, burned down by students last June in protest against white authority, have not been rebuilt. Moreover, yet another SSRC directive demanded that the hundreds of illegal shebeens (speakeasies) close down during the mourning period. After the fire-bombing of a few that stayed open, the shebeen queens (women operate most speakeasies) duly shut up shop, and Sowetoans did their Christmas drinking quietly at home...