SOUTH AFRICA: The Soweto Uprising: A Soul-Cry of Rage

• Share

"The whites of South Africa understand the mentality of the black man."

−Prime Minister John Vorster

The humiliations of everyday life for the 18 million blacks in white-ruled South Africa make a mockery of that boast. Some events make the very realities of repression stand out in particularly bold relief. One was Sharpeville: in 1960, police broke up a rioting mob of blacks in this Johannesburg suburb by firing pointblank into the crowd, killing 69 and wounding 186. Last week South Africa suffered a second Sharpeville. Its name was Soweto.

Virtually on the eve of Prime Minister Vorster's flight to West Germany for a meeting with Secretary of State Kissinger, the racial tensions that seethe just beneath the surface of South African life exploded in Soweto, a ramshackle, overcrowded satellite town for blacks on the outskirts of Johannesburg. In three bitter days and nights of wild rioting and skirmishes between club-wielding, stone-throwing blacks and heavily armed police, at least 100 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured; only a handful of the victims were white. The turmoil spread to at least seven other segregated black townships surrounding South Africa's largest industrial city. At week's end the violence subsided, although police remained on guard in Soweto and other neighboring townships.

Soweto was a chilling reminder to South African whites that they live as an extraordinarily privileged minority in a society that not only postulates second-class citizenship for blacks, but has codified repression, separatism and inequality into the law of the land−the hated system known as apartheid (apartness, pronounced a-part-hate). The violence was also a sharp blow to the prestige and image of shrewd, burly John Vorster, South Africa's powerful Prime Minister for the past decade.

Last week's rioting made it clear that South Africa, as well as neighboring white-ruled Rhodesia, must sooner or later−preferably sooner−adjust to ever growing black demands for justice and equality. In Washington, Kissinger expressed his regrets at the outbreak of violence, and said that he would explicitly spell out American opposition to apartheid at his meetings with the South African leader. "I'm not meeting with Vorster to make concessions or to lend approval of the system of government. I'm meeting to see if South Africa is willing to contribute to a moderate and peaceful evolution of events in southern Africa. The question I want to explore is whether South Africa is prepared to separate its own future from Rhodesia and Namibia [the Pretoria-ruled territory, also known as South West Africa, that wants independence]."

It was, most observers agreed, coincidence that black unrest exploded just as Vorster was about to display himself on the world scene as a statesman of segregation. South African black leaders pointed out that they had been warning the Pretoria government for months that unrest in Soweto had the potential of leading to another Sharpeville.