Inside Sprawling Soweto

Doctors darting

From place to place

With harried nurses at their side.

So it's Friday night.

Everybody's enjoying

In Soweto

-Oswald Mtshali,

Sounds of a Cowhide Drum

Even on Friday night -payday -there's not much to enjoy in Soweto. Into a 35-sq.-mi. area are packed perhaps a million people -650,000 by official count -and life is hard and bleak. Soweto is Johannesburg's Harlem, a black ghetto that has sprawled into the country's fourth largest city.

Very little is pretty about Soweto, not even the name (which rhymes with potato). It derives from no tribal dialect but from "southwestern township," its location, eight miles southwest of the larger white city. Soweto is actually a black bedroom community for Johannesburg. Most of the adults commute daily aboard crowded, segregated trains to jobs in the city. Few whites return the visits. To enter Soweto, a white person must obtain a special permit good only for daylight hours, a day at a time.

Pall of Smoke. Most Sowetoians live there at the whim of the white government, and can be evicted and sent back to tribal homelands for minor misbehavior. Fewer than 20% of their tiny, boxlike houses have electricity, no more than 5% have hot running water. Usually a cloying pall of smoke hangs over the rows of houses from the coal stoves used for both cooking and heating.

The only relief from blackness and oppression is Soweto's social life. Community halls provide television, a relatively new feature in South Africa, but since programs are allwhite, they generate little interest. Instead, Soweto families prefer to visit a beer garden for "Bantu beer" (made of slightly fermented maize), or a shebeen (speakeasy) for stronger drink and the sensuous local music called patha patha. The shebeens, which sprang up because black men could not be served hard liquor legally, are still unlawful, but police tolerate them as pressure valves.

Actually there are not enough police available to supervise the shebeens or control the populace. Thugs known as tsotsis prowl the streets, particularly on payday, to mug hapless passersby. With murders running at the rate of 1,000 a year, the all-black Soweto urban council (which advises on Soweto affairs for the all-white Johannesburg city council) has called for vigilante patrols.

Most residents are doomed to obscure jobs in Johannesburg, where they must face apartheid constantly and always carry the "reference book" that Soweto-born Poet Mtshali calls "the document of my existence." These passbooks -which must be produced, on threat of jail, whenever a policeman demands one -include photographs, place of residence, employer, taxes paid and special curfew privileges if any. The average black salary in Johannesburg is $140 a month, only slightly more than the cost of living for a family of five in the box houses of Soweto. Average white salaries, in contrast, are at least five times higher. If Sowetoians are lucky, they may advance to such jobs as computer programmer or bank teller, not necessarily restricted to whites. If they manage that, they can join Soweto's minuscule black elite (less than 1%) who live in a kind of Nob Hill known as Pioneer Avenue with ranch houses, one or two cars, black servants, golf courses and even an annual debutante ball.

Upper-class blacks, surveys indicate, are largely content with life in Soweto. Those less well off are not, and their discontent increases as their age goes down. Ominously, more than 55% of Sowetoians are under 20.

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