Word: township
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...white man in a black South African township, the Rev. Nico Smith faces death threats in his battle against apartheid...
Mamelodi is a black township of more than 300,000 on the outskirts of Pretoria. At Smith's request, not only was he about to become its white minister, but also he and his wife Ellen would be its sole white inhabitants. The Afrikaners, among whom Smith had spent his whole life, have a harsh word for behavior like that: Kwaardwilligverlating , meaning, literally, "malevolent parting." Says Smith: "It isn't just a divorce. It means you leave someone with the intention of destroying them. You become an enemy...
...narrow streets of downtown Johannesburg were strangely silent last week. Black workers and shoppers who normally jam the district by day were nowhere to be seen. Stores did desultory business; restaurants closed their doors. In ( Soweto, the sprawling black township outside Johannesburg, residents remained inside their homes...
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...
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...