The Violent Aftershock at Soweto

For a few desperate hours last week, it looked like a reprise of the bloody rioting in Soweto township, during which 176 people were killed and 1,139 injured in the worst racial violence in South Africa's history (TIME. June 28). On Wednesday, a crowd of 20,000 angry blacks, most of them students, gathered at dawn outside Soweto's Orlando Stadium, determined to march ten miles to police headquarters in downtown Johannesburg. Their goal: to demand the release of four student leaders arrested since the June violence.

Police had declared they were "ready for anything" and would stop the procession. But the crowd broke through a police line and surged forward, waving placards and singing freedom songs. "We are marching, not fighting," some shouted, making peace signs; others raised clenched fists.

The police might better have allowed a delegation of students to make the march to Johannesburg to deliver their protest, but the tradition of kragdadigheid (ironfistedness) in dealing with blacks dies slowly. At New Canada Railway Station, hard by the giant yellow waste heaps of the gold mines, the crowd ran up against another roadblock, this one heavily manned and guarded by antiriot squads reinforced with a fleet of "Hippo" armored personnel carriers. The police responded by hurling tear-gas canisters, then opened fire on the moving crowd, and the marchers panicked. This time, as it turned out, the police were evidently trying to avoid heavy casualties, because only two people were killed in the outburst. The march was effectively halted.

Soon, however, violence broke out elsewhere. Black youths pelted passing trains with stones. Some tried to prevent the 230,000 blacks from Soweto who work in Johannesburg from going to their jobs. A key railroad switching station was sabotaged to prevent the approximately 100 daily commuter trains from leaving Soweto for the city. As a result, tens of thousands of blacks failed to show up at their jobs in Johannesburg. By week's end only a handful of people had been killed in the new disturbances, but mobs of adults as well as youths were still roaming through the streets of Soweto, and squads of heavily armed antiriot police were maintaining a careful watch.

Soul-Searching. In a sense, Soweto has been smoldering ever since June. The government had quickly dropped its insistence that the Afrikaans language be used as the primary teaching medium in black schools--a rule that had been the catalyst for the earlier rioting. But the policy change, along with other government promises to improve living conditions in Soweto, had merely served to stimulate black demands for more important political concessions, especially among the frustrated young.

The continuing violence in the black townships has shocked every segment of South African society, raising the question of what the Nationalist government of Prime Minister John Vorster is going to do about the angry mood of the nation's urban blacks. Under the government's cherished apartheid program, blacks will become "citizens" of the nine autonomous homelands, or "Bantustans," now being established within South Africa. But such a system, even if it should prove acceptable to tribesmen who live in the homelands, would do little for the millions of blacks who live and work in the cities of "white" South Africa.

The national soul-searching about the meaning of the Soweto riots extends to the very heart of Afrikanerdom. Professor Dreyer Kruger of Rhodes University, for instance, recently predicted the doom of apartheid because of the growing hatred of the Afrikaner by his black countrymen. Leading Afrikaans newspapers have sharply criticized the government for failing to respond to legitimate black demands for more civil rights. Last week Dr. Wimpie de Klerk, editor of Die Transvaler, the Afrikaners' most powerful editorial voice, called for public debate over the question of representation for urban blacks and predicted "relaxation in racial policies over a broad spectrum."

So far, there are no signs that Vorster is prepared to make any such concessions. In any case, the .reforms may come too late to head off black unrest. Following last week's troubles in Soweto, Black Psychologist Nimrod Mkele, 56, warned: "The black youth of today are unlike our generation. They want it all now--right now. Unless Mr. Vorster shows that he is prepared to talk to us, to give us hope and a stake in the country, violence will erupt again."

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