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.