The Commuters

Day in and day out, week after week and year after year, the Negroes of sprawling Evaton left their slum location to climb aboard the buses of the Evaton Passenger Bus Service and ride to their jobs in the big factories of Vereeniging, Vanderbijl Park and Johannesburg. Then, a year ago, the white-owned bus company raised its fare. Thousands of Evaton's commuters began riding bicycles, forming car pools in native-owned cabs, or taking the slower railroad to work. As the boycott spread (as bus boycotts spread in the U.S. -see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), those who persisted in paying the higher bus fares found themselves threatened by those who refused to. Dozens were injured and at least three were killed.

Last week the tension over the bus fares exploded in an orgy of uncontrolled rioting. Opposing factions, organized into fighting impis (regiments), battled it out in the streets of Evaton for three days. Some 2,000 terrified women of the district hastily gathered up their children and their household goods and fled to the police barracks, where they set up a refugee camp, while police reinforcements from a dozen nearby cities fought the rioters with Sten guns and fell back in confusion before the wildly swinging clubs of the mobs. Four more Africans were killed and a score hospitalized. By the third night Evaton was a ghost town peopled only by small knots of men waiting for one another with knives or clubs.

At week's end the desperate bus company consented to reduce its fares to the old level. "We hope," said one official, aghast at the violence, "that this will stop some of the bloodshed." Some South Africans drew another lesson from it: the uncontrollable power of savage anger when South Africa's blacks are aroused.

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