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![]() ![]() In four months, 1,400 people were detained in Soweto. Botha declared another state of emergency in 1985, giving the police and army virtually unlimited powers, including the right to arrest any student not in school during class hours. Guerrilla raids against government targets increased from 1977.Īs popular resistance grew, then-President Pieter W. Soweto youngsters flocked to the underground Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military branch of the banned African National Congress. Riots subsequently broke out in townships across the country. President Clinton visited it during his African tour this year. Today the Hector Petersen memorial in the heart of Soweto is a place of pilgrimage for foreign visitors. The official death toll was 23, with hundreds injured. Enraged, the students ran amok, setting fire to government offices, municipal beer halls, buses and cars. On June 16, 1976, the police confronted a student protest march, and, without warning, opened fire at the youngsters. Prime among these was the black-consciousness movement, which began to grip the youth of Soweto. "The very process of tightening and restructuring apartheid institutions had generated social forces that would lead to their destruction," wrote Bonner and Segal. In 1968, it ended homeownership rights in Soweto, depriving 10,000 householders of their domestic security. In the mid-1960s, the government began relocating blacks into Bantustans, or homelands. The council committee eventually played it safe, opting in 1963 for "South-Western Townships," or, abbreviated, Soweto. ![]() Among the proposals: Black Bird's Bunk, Darkiesuburban, Darkest Africa, Kethollo (Segregation), and Kwantu Thinavhuyo (We have nowhere to go). The apartheid era had begun.Ī competition was launched to name the mushrooming townships outside Johannesburg. Immediately, the new government tightened controls on black workers, turned black property freeholds into 30-year leases and limited the locations where blacks could live. It was against this background that the Afrikaner Nationalist Party, campaigning for racially segregated cities, was voted into office in 1948. The council reacted by evicting the squatters, who simply moved to the next plot of land. The living conditions inevitably provoked political unrest and the emergence of squatter camps, where the homeless seized land and built shacks of corrugated iron, wood or cardboard. ![]()
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