Word: township
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mavimbela, 26, is the broad-shouldered son of a house painter. He dropped out of school at 17: the family lacked the money to pay school fees for six children. Drifting from township to township, he found no steady work. Two friends invited him to act in a play about a youth who fled after the Soweto uprising of 1976 to join a guerrilla army. Furtively, the three would perform in community halls in black townships, ready to escape through a back door should police arrive...
...visitors had traveled only ten miles from Pretoria to the black township of Mamelodi. But it was a vast journey, from the affluent white world of South Africa to its Third World of black poverty. The 173 whites, many of them members of the Dutch Reformed Church, came to Mamelodi, home to as many as half a million people, last week to strike a small blow against apartheid. For four days they lived and ate with blacks, slept in cramped homes, some without electricity and indoor plumbing, and washed at backyard faucets. "The tragedy of apartheid that we learn from...
...hours before the hangings were to take place. The court said there was new evidence of possible perjury by a key state witness in the case of the so-called Sharpeville Six. The six were convicted in connection with the 1984 killing of a councilman in the black township of Sharpeville, even though they were not found to have had a direct role in the slaying but only to have been in "common purpose" with a murderous crowd. Earlier in the week police turned out in force in Cape Town when Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu led a service, attended...
...visit to Mamelodi was organized by Nico Smith, 58, the only resident white minister in an urban black township. In the early 1980s he turned his back on the powerful Dutch Reformed Church and became a minister in the black branch of the church in Mamelodi. In 1986 he moved into the township with his wife Ellen, a child psychiatrist. Says Smith: "The whites of this country have got to see what pain there is under the black skin...
Whites rarely go to black neighborhoods; in fact, until recently, whites had to obtain a permit to enter a black township. The visit to Mamelodi was attacked by Ed Cain, director of the right-wing United Christian Action, as "designed to promote Marxist doctrine." But in Smith's view it was designed to promote understanding. The visitors saw a township where many of Pretoria's black workers reside in tiny four-room houses under the nighttime glare of powerful arc lights. "It gives the impression that someone is watching them day and night," said Louis Fourie, a white participant...