Another Country

In June of 1976, Soweto, the thickly populated black bedroom community southwest of Johannesburg, erupted into headlines worldwide. There the dry tinder of apartheid ignited in a series of savage spontaneous combustions that cost 176 dead, 1,136 wounded, and $40 million in destruction before two heavily armed battalions of police finally stamped the riots out. Soweto at once became a code word for all that is hateful about the racial policies of South Africa. As in Watts, the victims were overwhelmingly black (just two whites dead); as in Watts, the damage to property (libraries, clinics, commercial establishments, homes) injured chiefly blacks; and as in Watts, the irony and tragedy of blacks mauling blacks underscored, through its irrationality, how desperate the central frustration had become. The helots of Sparta, James Burnham reminisced (NR, July 23, 1976), finally would stand for no more.

Soweto (SOuth WEstern TOwnships —even the name is contrived, a bureaucratic agglutination) symbolized to the hostile international community white racism and a redneck Afrikaner determination never to permit black South Africans their place in the sun. Soweto further symbolizes the alleged callousness of the ruling (white, Boer) National Party toward poor blacks. In the popular imagination, Soweto is synonymous with ghetto and slum.

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F. Reid Buckley

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In June of 1976, Soweto, the thickly populated black bedroom community southwest of Johannesburg, erupted into headlines worldwide. There the dry tinder of apartheid ignited in a series of savage spontaneous combustions that cost 176 dead, 1,136 wounded, and $40 million in destruction before two heavily armed battalions of police finally stamped the riots out. Soweto at once became a code word for all that is hateful about the racial policies of South Africa. As in Watts, the victims were overwhelmingly black (just two whites dead); as in Watts, the damage to property (libraries, clinics, commercial establishments, homes) injured chiefly blacks; and as in Watts, the irony and tragedy of blacks mauling blacks underscored, through its irrationality, how desperate the central frustration had become. The helots of Sparta, James Burnham reminisced (NR, July 23, 1976), finally would stand for no more.

Soweto (SOuth WEstern TOwnships —even the name is contrived, a bureaucratic agglutination) symbolized to the hostile international community white racism and a redneck Afrikaner determination never to permit black South Africans their place in the sun. Soweto further symbolizes the alleged callousness of the ruling (white, Boer) National Party toward poor blacks. In the popular imagination, Soweto is synonymous with ghetto and slum.