Word: soweto
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South African-born, Soweto-reared Photographer Peter Magubane returned to work last week after spending seven days in a hospital recovering from buckshot wounds received when he was caught in police crossfire at a funeral near Johannesburg. Says Magubane: "I'm fine now, but I'm a bit worried about the metal detectors at the airport when I leave. I'm still carrying 17 lead pellets in my feet and backside...
Reporter Peter Hawthorne, who has covered South Africa for TIME since 1965, was first exposed to the country's turbulence in 1960, when he walked the silent streets of Sharpeville hours after 69 blacks were killed by police gunfire. He covered the 1976 riots in Soweto, and in the past several weeks has again dodged township mobs, and a few rocks. But the danger does not deter Hawthorne. "The story is its own magnet," he says. "There are real people living here, black and white, and they have no choice but to coexist in peace or die together...
Nonetheless, one aspect of their lives has changed hardly at all. South African whites rarely if ever visit black townships and have only the vaguest idea of what life in them is like. Says a Johannesburg travel agent: "Foreign visitors who take the scheduled bus tour to Soweto," the sprawling black township southwest of Johannesburg, "know more about the place than do most of the city's whites." Those tours were temporarily canceled a fortnight ago after a bus carrying American, German and British tourists was stoned by youths...
Every white South African city and town, even the smallest dorp (village), has its Soweto, its KwaThema, its satellite township where the blacks live. It is where the paved road ends and the dirt begins. Asphalt highways cut through Soweto, but the side streets disappear quickly into dust or mud. In the shantytowns, children and old women gather at water points to fill plastic bottles and cans, which they balance atop their heads with hip-swaying confidence as they walk home along potholed paths. The smaller the township, the fewer the amenities. Some communities have only a few electric lights...
...Soweto is atypical, both for its size (pop. 1.2 million) and its relative sophistication. It has a well-established middle class and an unmistakable power elite. But there, as elsewhere, political ferment is accentuated by slum living, lack of amenities, overcrowding, crime and the breakdown of family life. The despair of township life, the prospect of no breakout from such confinement, is felt most keenly by the young. They hold the police in contempt; in Soweto they jokingly refer to patrolling police vehicles as "Zola Budd" and "Mary Decker," who competed at the Los Angeles Olympics, depending on which vehicle...