SOUTH AFRICA: Soweto: The Children Take Charge

One year ago, on June 16, the fury and frustration of South Africa's blacks exploded in rioting at Soweto, the huge (estimated population: 1.2 million) amalgam of segregated townships on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The violence —and counterviolence by South African security forces—spread to other black ghettos. By the time the "disturbances" subsided in December, 618 had died, nearly half the number of lives lost in Ulster's eight years of bloody civil strife.

Soweto (an acronym for southwest townships) remembered its grim anniversary last week in a solemn moratorium that its residents, with calculated irony, called "Black Christmas." There was a two-day general strike by African workers and packed church services fiercely punctuated with raised black-power salutes. Hymns of liberation like Senzenina (What Have We Done?) were sung about Azania—the name that black nationalists use for South Africa. Black sports and entertainment events were canceled. Even Soweto's 400 illegal drinking shebeens were closed. White and African police gathered in force outside the wire fences that border the township, but the much feared renewal of rioting did not occur. There was one fatality; a 17-year-old Soweto youth was found dead in a shopping street, supposedly after having been questioned by police. The most serious disturbances occurred 1,000 miles away in the industrial town of Uitenhage, near Port Elizabeth, where seven blacks were shot dead and 33 injured in two days of rioting.

Soweto's Black Christmas and all its trimmings were planned—and enforced —by a secretive, emergent political force of students, largely of high school age. Officially they are known as the Soweto Students Representative Council (SSRC), but they are described simply, by themselves and by the older blacks of Soweto, as "The Children." They are, in fact, the dominant, virtually unrivaled political power within Soweto. TIME Johannesburg Bureau Chief William Me Whirter spent two weeks in the township, observing the mood a year later and The Children in action. His report:

Soweto's Children have come to rule the township with a mixture of brutality and bold authority that both fascinates and frightens their elders. These junior enforcers have capitalized on their legacy as the heirs of the martyred youths who led last June's upheaval, and on a general sense of despair and futility within the urban community. "We may still be children," one of their leaders says, "but politically we have been through very much." The Children are now seeing to it that almost everyone else in Soweto follows their lead.

During the past year, The Children have taken command over Soweto's schools, usurping classrooms for their own closed strategy sessions and then sending home their instructions for community action against the government through an army of student recruits. Says a black parent: "My twelve-year-old comes in and warns me that if I go to work, 'we shall assault you.' We. Can you imagine that?"