Word: township
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Three days later, as the unrest, powered by what Naudé calls "the anger of the voteless," flickered on despite the emergency, another prominent churchman spoke at a mass funeral service in the township of KwaThema, 35 miles east of Johannesburg, to deliver a message to both black and white South Africans. He was Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu of Johannesburg, the black South African who last year was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his long struggle against apartheid. Only two weeks before, the dynamic, gray-haired bishop had saved the life of a black suspected of being a police informer...
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...
...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 arrives first...
...exile, currently in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. The A.N.C. has received support from the Soviet Union, as well as some Western nations, and is increasingly co operating with the also banned South African Communist Party. The alliance has made it convenient for the Pretoria government to describe the township unrest as Communist inspired. Over the years, the A.N.C. has trained guerrilla fighters at camps in various black African countries and staged a number of border attacks and acts of sabotage. Its present strength is estimated to be about 7,000 armed men, but it suffered a severe setback last...