Soweto: the Students Take Over

Soweto: the Students Take Over

Bloodshed. Hand-to-hand righting in crowded streets. Helicopter-borne police reinforcements swooping down into black ghettos. There were all the signs of another racial conflict in the black townships of white-ruled South Africa last week--all, that is, except one. This time blacks were fighting blacks, not whites, in an outburst of violence over the Christmas holidays that left at least 26 dead in three ghettoized Cape Town suburbs: Langa, Guguletu and Nyanga.

The cause of the black-on-black mayhem was a drive by young black students to expand further the power they have wielded in the ghettos since last June, when the bloodiest racial demonstrations in South African history shook the country. Back then it was Soweto, the huge (pop. 1.2 million), black suburb of Johannesburg, that erupted. The violence there, touched off by black anger over the forced use of the whites' Afrikaans language in black school instruction, spread rapidly. Since then, effective political power in Soweto, as well as some other black enclaves, has migrated to an underground organization of several hundred young blacks, known as the Soweto Students Representative Council (SSRC). Last month the SSRC declared a ban on all Christmas celebrations to commemorate those who died in June. When student colleagues in Cape Town tried to emulate the SSRC by demanding a boycott of Christmas holiday work, their efforts met with stiff resistance from migrant workers and led to the latest fratricidal violence.

Soweto's blacks insist that the death toll in their township alone last June was at least 350, or more than double the official toll of 168. (The government now admits that most of the officially dead were shot in the back.) Dozens of students are still detained under draconian security laws, and at least 1,000 others face trial on such catchall charges as causing public violence. Perhaps another 1,000 students, fearing further police pressure in the form of post-midnight security sweeps, have fled South Africa for neighboring Botswana and Swaziland.

For five months after the June riots, Soweto was off limits to white journalists; government officials insisted that their safety could not be guaranteed. Among the few who have been allowed into the township is TIME'S Africa Bureau Chief Lee Griggs. His report:

Christmas in Soweto this year was grimmer and even more subdued than usual. Workers, many of them living at or below the effective poverty line for South Africa's urban blacks, traditionally spend their modest year-end bonuses on a few toys, a bottle or two of brandy for a party, or perhaps a new piece of furniture for the drab little single-story brick houses in which they live.

But even the usual small pleasures have been denied to many Sowetoans this Christmas. The township is in unofficial mourning for its many hundreds of missing. The mourning period was mounted by students still at liberty in Soweto, as a mark of respect for their absent colleagues. After some initial resistance, Soweto's elders generally complied with leaflets distributed by SSRC calling for a moratorium on Christmas presents, parties, the exchange of greeting cards and any other outward sign of celebration. One group of students went so far as to break up a wedding ceremony as "inappropriate"; since then, many marriages have been postponed. One SSRC leaflet warns "it is on such occasions that liquor is served and people generally tend to be drunk and merry."

Shut Up Shebeens. There is another reason why there was less heavy drinking in Soweto this Christmas--government-owned beer halls and liquor stores, burned down by students last June in protest against white authority, have not been rebuilt. Moreover, yet another SSRC directive demanded that the hundreds of illegal shebeens (speakeasies) close down during the mourning period. After the fire-bombing of a few that stayed open, the shebeen queens (women operate most speakeasies) duly shut up shop, and Sowetoans did their Christmas drinking quietly at home.

Student power, in effect, rules Soweto today. Says David Thebehali, 37, who as chairman of the Urban Bantu Council (U.B.C.) serves as Soweto's unofficial mayor: "The parents were shocked at first by how the kids behaved during the riots. However, a lot of us soon realized that the students were only fighting the battles we should have fought years ago but didn't have the courage to fight. Now the parents solidly support the students, while they don't always agree with the tactics."

Although born and bred in Soweto, Thebehali is not popular there because he is an appointee and therefore considered a stooge of the white government in Pretoria. But he is doing his best to improve essential services in Soweto. Last 26 week Thebehali joined the mayor of Johannesburg in establishing a fund, targeted at $115,000, to help rebuild some of the facilities destroyed last June.

Soweto today is still pock-marked by the burned-out hulks of buildings destroyed in those riots. But Thebehali points out that, shebeens aside, virtually every damaged structure was a symbol of white control: Bantu administration offices, banks, schools, police stations. Useful facilities, like clinics, and privately run cultural centers, such as the Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A., were purposely spared. The "government claims that the violence and destruction here was mindless," says Thebehali. "But see for yourself what was burned and what wasn't. The kids knew what they were doing."

Thebehali carefully steers clear of politics. Says he: "My job is to provide a better quality of life and better services to the people. I leave it to others to pursue the political role."

That role is filled at the moment by the SSRC. Since the June riots, it has three times tried to force Soweto's 250,000 workers to stay home in a show of solidarity with student protests, but with only limited effect. Too many Sowetoans live too close to poverty to risk losing even a day's pay. The current mourning campaign has been more successful. SSRC plans its next show of strength this week, when Soweto's schools are scheduled to reopen. It has vowed to keep the township's 180,000 children home to protest the poor quality of primary and secondary education--free and compulsory for South Africa's whites but only optional for blacks, who must pay annual school fees of around $75.

Last week the government promised free textbooks for most black schoolchildren by 1978, and Soweto's parents and "Mayor" Thebehali hope the students will relent and drop the boycott. But SSRC is adamant. "We understand our parents' anguish," says a Soweto high school senior named Michael, who, as a known SSRC sympathizer, is on the run from the police and sleeps in a different house every night. "We know as well as they do that education is the tool of our liberation in the long run but not the second-class schooling we get under the Bantu Education Act. We must keep up the pressure to force the whites to give us the same education they have."

American Heroes. Since he too is wanted by the police as an SSRC agitator, another student, Shadrack, 17, met me in a remote section of Soweto. "We are not a bunch of bomb-throwing radicals," he insisted. "Because we struggle for a decent education, the authorities call us Communists. What rubbish! My heroes are not Marx and Lenin. They are Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Our campaign is peaceful, non-Communist and nonviolent. How many police have been killed in this bloodshed? Three? That should prove which side is the violent one." (Officially, the SSRC has deplored firebombings buttressing its boycott.)

Soweto's white police commander, Brigadier Jan Visser, has promised that when the schools reopen this week, his men will be "circumspect, not interfere with the educational process and confine [themselves] to controlling criminal elements." But the authorities are committed to keeping schools open for any students who want to defy the boycott. If SSRC tries intimidation to keep children away, Pretoria is likely to counter with its tough, heavily armed and mostly white riot police. It was the presence of riot police in Soweto last June that enraged student protesters and ultimately led to the shootings. If police turn up again in the township, Soweto may have still more reason for mourning.

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