Word: soweto
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...arose, too, the smoke and flames of arson and the swirling white clouds of police tear gas. By week's end, at least 34 blacks had been killed and 150 injured in renewed rioting across the country. After the June toll of 176 dead in Johannesburg's Soweto township, the eruption of violence raised anew the question of whether South Africa can avoid outright racial war. So far, the white centers remain peaceful, but their long-term prospects are not good...
...some 1,000 blacks rushed the Langa police station. The police again opened fire and killed at least two more people. Other demonstrators set up roadblocks and stoned trains and buses to prevent workers from going to their jobs in Cape Town. There, as in Johannesburg's Soweto, the tactic failed to disrupt business and industry seriously, but managed to intimidate many black workers. As one Johannesburg worker told Lee Griggs, TIME'S Africa bureau chief: "They scare me. This morning some young ones tried to make me stay in Soweto. 'Do not go,' they said...
When the current round of rioting broke out in Soweto this month, white officials started talking about a new deal for blacks. Early last week Justice Minister James Kruger declared: "Make no mistake. The government will not turn a deaf ear to black grievances. I want blacks to have far more say in areas relating to law and order, and I hope all policing of black townships can soon be done by blacks themselves." But government attitudes quickly hardened. After remaining silent for nearly a week, Prime Minister John Vorster warned: "If there are grievances, the door is open...
Soon, however, violence broke out elsewhere. Black youths pelted passing trains with stones. Some tried to prevent the 230,000 blacks from Soweto who work in Johannesburg from going to their jobs. A key railroad switching station was sabotaged to prevent the approximately 100 daily commuter trains from leaving Soweto for the city. As a result, tens of thousands of blacks failed to show up at their jobs in Johannesburg. By week's end only a handful of people had been killed in the new disturbances, but mobs of adults as well as youths were still roaming through...
Soul-Searching. In a sense, Soweto has been smoldering ever since June. The government had quickly dropped its insistence that the Afrikaans language be used as the primary teaching medium in black schools-a rule that had been the catalyst for the earlier rioting. But the policy change, along with other government promises to improve living conditions in Soweto, had merely served to stimulate black demands for more important political concessions, especially among the frustrated young...