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Home , Soweto, Township (South Africa)

1976- The Struggle Against

by Jennifer Davis

N JUNE 16 fired into a people of Angola and Mozambique, the coming of 0 peaceful demonstration by protesting students in age of a new generation able to ptck up the political Soweto-the totally segregated black area 14 miles leadership inside , and the increasing . outside . During the following week tensions. bred by the contradiction between simultan­ • violent confrontations shook many of the ghettoes in eous industrialization and economic growth and the Witwatersrand triangle, which encloses the largest intensified "retribalization" and oppression. single concentration of mdustries and coal and gold There have been many signs of the new move mining in South Africa. Violence flared also in distant towards active struggle-a dramatic wave of strikes country areas, involving students in at least three among African workers, the formation of a black widely separated , as the reservations student organization (SASO) firmly dedicated to (reserves) assigned to Africans are called. The official bringing about radical political change, and a growing death toll was 170, 2 white, 168 black. Africans on the number of political trials of so-called terrorists. scene reported 1,000 killed and many more wounded, The mass uprisings of June belong in that context. beaten and arrested. The South African Government has blamed "outside The immediate spark that fired the current explo­ agitators" and "Communists" for the violence. The sions was black student opposition to the use of press talks of "tsotsis" intimidating the general in the teaching ofhtstory and mathematics. population into joining the crowds in the street. But Afrikaans, the language of the ruling white Nation­ the real causes of the confrontation lie elsewhere-in alist Party, is identified as the language of the the intensifying oppression of the blacks by white oppressor, and the Government has always had great South Africa and m the spreading militant mood of dtfficulty in forcing Africans to accept it. But using it the black population. in the schools is only a symbol of the whole system of Almost 1.5 million Africans live in Soweto (South "Bantu education," which has been a focus of black Western ), an area artificially created in the resistance ever since its introduction in 1953. 1950's by the forcing of thousands of black families The purpose of Bantu education, which essentially from their homes in segregated enclaves inside the establisnes a separate educational system for blacks, "white" city to what was seen as a less threatening was described quite openly by , the location 15 miles away. The ghetto was deliberately predecessor of current Prime Minister Johannes built to be easily isolated and controlled-placed in an Vorster: " ... education should stand with both feet in open flat area (easily accessible to planes and the reserves and have its roots in the spirit and being helicopters), circled by a ring road, with few major of Bantu society .... There is no place for him [the exits. African] in the European commumty above the level As a place to live, Soweto is both a product and a or certain forms of labor." The Africans fought its victim of the apartheid system. It has an official imposition bitterly, dubbing it "education for population of 800,000 but an actual population of slavery." There were school boycotts and parent close to 1.5 million. The difference is accounted for by pro~e~ts.; h~ndreds ofteac~ers ~ere thrown out ofjobs over half a million men, women and children who for JOmmg m the fight agamst 1t. live, work and hide illegally in the area. In turn Bantu education is only one element in the complex apartheid system that has been constructed to produce white privilege at the cost of black Life Under Apartheid dispossession. . Press reports have consistently referred to the June The political system that protects white privilege in events as nots led by "tsotsis" -young hooligans-with South Africa has laid down that blacks have no the implication that they are simply isolated eruptions permanent rights in the "white" urban areas. They are of mindless, directionless violence. It would be more defined as temporary sojourners whose permanent accurate to see them as part of a new phase in the home is a -the particular Bantustan African struggle for liberation, a period of increasing depending on the person's supposed ethnic origin. militancy and resistance after a Iong lull. There has Tlius, by definition, Africans are dispossessed of all been African resistance to white conquest and appro­ political and economic rights in 87 percent of South priation of wealth and power since the beginning of Africa, the "white" area, in return for the doubtful colonization 300 years ago. The brutal repression of privilege of citizenship in a bit of the remaining 13 the post- 1960's, the banning of black percent, the total black area. . political orgamzation, and the arrest and/or exile of The aim of the whole system is to provide the black leaders slowed the process; now it is growing white-owned economy with a constant flow of cheap · again and with rapidly increasing momentum. black labor and, as far as possible, to prevent the This t4rust has been stimulated by a coalescence of development of a large settled urban black popula­ forces, including the victory against colonialism of the tion, wbich has always been seen as a threat to white dominance. So blacks may work in towns, but they Immediate targets for their anger were the offices of must never regard those towns as homes; they are the Bantu Administration Boards, many of which they merely migrants in a white society. burned, thereby destroying the records by which their At least 400,000 Soweto residents have no proper lives are so mercilessly controlled. The liquor stores houses. Eighty-six percent of the houses that do exist and bars, all owned by that board, were also attacked, have no electricity, ~nd few have w~terborne as were other symbols of the white government. But it sewerage, proper bathrooms or even runmng water. was the police, not the people, who unleashed uncon­ There are two cinemas, six gas stations, one bank; no trolled brutal violence. Outside the segregated mor­ supermarket, no pharmacy, no bakery, no savings gue in Johannesburg, one week after the first shoot­ bank, no car dealer, no department store. Small black mgs, John Bums of The New York Times talked with a traders run general stores; since 1968 each trader has Soweto undertaker, waiting with some families who been allowed one trading license and has not been had come to seek out their dead. He described three of permitted to conduct business "for any purpose other the bodies he was preparing for burial as those of than that of providing for the daily essential domestic children aged 12, 13 and 16. requirements of the Bantu residents." No black may The bloody week has underscored many of the own land or a house in Sowetd or in any other town or terrible realities confronting those who seek to bring city. Nor are they allowed to develop any economic about real change in South Africa. independence; they must simply serve the white First there is the intransigence of the Government, economy. which even under pressure will not make serious Some argue that economic growth and indus­ concessions. Then there is· the general white attitude: trialization will automatically bring in their wake an Very few whites protested, and most whites clearly improved life for . This argument is will fi~t hard to preserve their privileged way of life popular with US investors, who now have a $1.5 and will in fact give the police uncontrolled license to billion stake in preserving ~tability in South Africa. In kill, if that will help do the job. Then there is the fact, time has exposed the fatuousness of this belief brutality of the police. There has been not one more clearly than any argument could. Th~re is allegation, by anybody, that the people were armed; intense poverty in Soweto: Authorities estimate that no one fired at the police. The demonstration began the current minimum income necessary for a family of peacefully, and even when the crowds were driven to six for bare survival is 119.69 rands ($135) a month. attack they used only sticks and stones. Yet the police The average wage a Soweto worker takes home every used their guns over and over again to terrorize the month is 80 rands ($92). White workers' wages, in people bacK into subservience. contrast, average at least six times more. All these are serious problems for the people. But to The gap is not closing, for as black wages climb so these must be added another-the fact that immedi­ do white wages. An 18 percent inflation rate eats up ately after these shootings Henry Kissinger saw fit to the value of the increases. meet with Prime Minister V orster in West Germany If economic growth has done little to improve the for what were termed friendly negotiations. Little has relative position of blacks in the pyramid of South been revealed about the substance of the talks, but to African society, it has done nothing at all to eradicate those who have watched US policy in Africa consist­ their political powerlessness. In fact, the tensions ently give sup£ort to the cofonialists and the white created by changing economic needs (the necessity, supremacists m the name of "seeking to ensure for instance, to allow black workers to acquire some peaceful change," the signs are ominous. technical skills) has brought with it intensified controls There can be no doubt that the struggle for freedom on the black population and an escalating attempt to will be a long and harsh one. The blood spilled in oppose their demands for equality by a process of Soweto will not be the last. The South African "retribalization." Current government policy is de­ Government has armed itself physically with tremen­ Friving Africans of the last few rights they had in dous weaponry-guns, aircraft, etc.-and politically 'white" society as it pushes for the adoption of the with a system of security laws that allows it to arrest "independent Bantustan" concept. · and detain anyone, on any suspicion, for as long as it White towns in South Africa have independent likes. It will use all these weapons in its attempt to elected municipal authorities, rather like the US crush the people as they seek the right to control their system. But Soweto and other urban ghettoes near lives, the wealth they produce and the future of their Johannesburg are all controlled by the West Rand country. Bantu Administration Board, a policing agency of the Those on the outside must do more than watch and Government's Bantu Administration Department. All wait; now is the time to ensure that the US does not blacks have to have permission to live m Soweto; a once again embroil itself in giving increasing support wife may not automatically join her husband, nor a to a government rooted in reaction. There is no way to child its mother. Loss of a job usually means loss of the improve apartheid; it must be abolished. D "right" to stay in the area, as does anything that causes one to lose favor with the local authorities. People are reprintMI from Cltrilliartity attd Crisis July 19, 1976 continually "endorsed" out of the area, back to the Bantustans. Every black person in Soweto is con­ ~ stantly threatened by a network of apartheid-enforc­ '· ing laws, and every year one in four adults is arrested THE AFRICA FUND \ for some contraventiOn of the . (associated with the American Committee on Africa) 305 East 46th Street New York, New York 10017 Terrible Realities (212) 838-5030

It was .this whole system that thousands were JENNIFER DAVIS Is a South African economist serving as research rebelling against when they took to the streets in June. director lor the American Committee on Africa.