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?"

Because The Children said so, tens of thousands of Johannesburg's black workers--perhaps more than half the city's total African work force--observed the "stay-at-home" last week, despite employer threats of wage losses. Many others who stayed out of their jobs also stayed out of Soweto. The Children dictated a list of precise instructions to be followed, down to three-hour-long church services. Their agents even raided the shebeens, warning the bar owners to stay closed. Surprisingly, these decrees were observed--even though the SSRC chairman and 20 members of the executive committee were picked up and detained the weekend before. Within five days, The Children had filled up their ranks and elected a new leader.

Ineffectual Council. Their major political victory, however, was forcing the 41-member Urban Bantu Council (UBC) to disband. It is Soweto's only elected, administrative body, with purely consultative powers. But the council is regarded by many blacks as ineffectual and too subservient to the government. Perhaps the most vulnerable member of the UBC was its deputy leader, a wealthy Soweto shop owner, Richard Maponya. He was taken from his food store by a group of Children to the grounds of Orlando West High School. Children suddenly began to appear from all directions. "No one called the others," says Maponya. "Two of them just came from that corner, three more appeared from the other one. I saw the leader stay back at the fence until he came up at the last with two of his members." Maponya refuses to say any more about the rest of the incident, which lasted an hour. The Children admit he was threatened with an economic boycott against his store--and, vaguely, perhaps worse. Later, one student said coldly: "We're not through with Maponya."

Many other adults have been similarly threatened. Says another prominent member of the UBC after his own encounter with The Children: "They would say, we are just talking to you because we don't want to hurt you. We can wipe you out overnight. We respect you as a parent, but don't say we didn't talk to you. They address you as a child talking to an adult, but no adult has ever shaken me like that. You can almost hear the mob behind them saying, 'Let's kill the sellout.' They told me there were other people who were even more 'difficult' than they were."

Dispensing a rough brand of street justice, The Children have beaten and bombed the houses of those considered fainthearts and defectors. Two weeks ago, a group of 500 students, still in their school uniforms, marched casually to the West Rand Administration Board (WRAB) building in the neighboring township of Dobsonville and began stoning its windows. When one of the African guards chased after them, the students went to his home, about a mile away, and gutted it with petrol bombs. The Dobsonville Bantu council members began to send in their own resignations that day.

Ruthless as they may seem, such tactics are regarded by many blacks not as intimidation but as an assertion of strength within a community historically lacking both unity and leadership. "The Children have ' definitely succeeded in winning support from the whole community," admits one of their own former UBC targets. "Not a single black spoke out in favor of the UBC despite the fact that we were claiming we had helped hundreds and hundreds of people." The Children's show of strength is given credit for working miracles that their patient elders failed to perform. Says one Soweto pastor: "You can rest assured when my ten-year-old girl gets home, she tells me: 'This ought to happen.' We have been through our Good Friday and now we are looking to the Easter of this mighty resurrection, which no one can contain or stop. Perhaps God in his wisdom has put the truth in the mouths of babes."

The influence of The Children has reached into most levels of community life. They were instrumental in persuading a consortium of private banks in Johannesburg to offer $70 million in loans to bring more electric power to a community where less than a fifth of the homes have light. When a group of Soweto doctors funded a mobile clinic intended for health needs in the rural areas, the students intervened, asking that it be kept in Soweto. They wanted the mobile clinic kept in Soweto for political exposure. The doctors at first refused, but the students buttonholed them individually, arguing that some of the township's former clinics had still not been rebuilt after the riot damage. Eventually, the doctors agreed to keep the clinic in Soweto for at least three months. "They know our weaknesses," says one of the physicians. "They don't split us apart. They just grab us and put us in the action."

The Children have even had an impact on Soweto's white administrators and the police. "The students keep moving, keep threatening, keep making provocative statements, keep making the authorities nervous." says one of their teachers. "They have made other people aware of the fallacy that the system is invincible." Older blacks report that there are fewer post-midnight raids in Soweto these days, fewer peremptory demands by police for blacks to show their passbooks. One detainee from Soweto who was released reports that the police seemed much less confident now than when he had been arrested. "The very people who were pushing me around offered me cigarettes and chairs," he said. "They told me the man who had handled my case had gone in for an ulcer operation. They said the things they had done to me were the same things that the black man wouldn't hesitate to use against them. Afterward, they sat me down and asked me what I would do if I were in their position. Would I hand over power without resistance? I told them they already had so many powers against us, why had it been necessary to open fire on The Children [during last year's riots]? No, it was wrong, they admitted, a mistake, and the country had suffered a great deal from it."

The anger felt by Soweto's adult blacks has long been kept hidden and unexpressed. Thanks to The Children, says an activist schoolteacher, "the good African mask is now coming off. The maid who always smiles when she goes to work and smiles until she comes home and gets so angry that she says she would like to poison the whole family. The office worker who smiles and tells his boss what a nice day he's had until he comes back to Soweto and tells his wife he could slit the man's throat. We have been our own victims. We show the false part, looking happy and satisfied with ourselves until we are alone and together. People have tried to take it for too long, bottling it up, until it reaches a stage when we can't take it any more, and then the rage surprises everyone, even ourselves. We have practiced this discipline for so long that we are very deceptive."

The Children say their next goal is to further immobilize the remaining symbols of white government and institutions in Soweto, beginning with the Bantu education in their own schools. The students are already applying pressure on their teachers to resign, thereby disrupting school life. But why destroy something that offers black children a means of getting a job and a home? "It's a question of peace of mind," says one student leader, 19. "Ever since I was born, I have never had such peace. Eventually we will have to disrupt the administrative machinery of this government, but we are not in a hurry because it's inevitable. Even if it doesn't come in a generation, there will come a time for [the whites] to confess their mistakes."

The rage of The Children is visceral, but not always well focused. Already there is much talk among the students about the need to liberate themselves by taking the war to the white man, in the form of urban terrorism. Brigadier Jan Visser, head of the Soweto police, who assumed command last fall after the riots, is writing his master's thesis on the arrival of black power in Soweto. In his interrogation of detained student leaders, he has tried to separate the issues from the anger. "I don't think they know themselves what the main grievances are," he says. "They can't really tell me what the crux of the situation is. I try to ask them about Bantu education and they talk about the system. I say: 'What do you mean by the system?' They answer: 'Don't ask us silly questions.' "

Is Soweto entering the first stage of a decisive new era for blacks in South Africa? Some of The Children have already decided to take more active roles. Perhaps 1,500 have already left their high schools in Soweto for military training in Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania. Few of them have returned. One father remembers his 17-year-old daughter leaving home in April. When he and his wife objected, she asked them in the direct way of the students: "So you want your freedom to be won by other children, not your children?"

Although The Children have probably gained more support within the community than any other body ever has, they are still a long way from the overwhelming unity that has eluded blacks for so long. They are still criticized within the townships for having "frightened jobs out of the country" and for exposing innocent blacks to the unknown risks of retaliation and government crackdowns. Says one of their moderate critics: "It's really a tragedy that you must use the tactics of fear and intimidation to unite black people. Look at what's happened this year. Has it really changed the political status of black people? Has it changed jobs and wages? Whatever action has been done has not brought material benefits to us at all. All we've done is create some awareness of ourselves overseas. There is going to be a vacuum for some time."

New Life. Despite that vacuum, despite the black opposition that still exists, there is no question that the youths have captured Soweto--partly on their own, partly because their elders failed to lead. And the townships will never be the same. True, some aspects of the old Soweto still exist: the neatly kept gardens of middle-class black homes; the Dube Lawn Bowls Association, whose members still gather every Sunday in their English whites; the Zionists, an Africanized Christian sect, famous for their daylong religious dances that begin at prayer services in backyard tents on Saturday nights.

More important, though, are the signs of a new kind of life in Soweto, a spirit that is not limited to political consciousness. Despite the poverty and the joblessness, there are small tokens of enterprise in the townships. Residents are buying hulks of old cars to start their own jitney taxi service. Women are organizing neighborhood communal food-growing projects and day-care centers. People are buying transistors, tape decks and television sets, as if suddenly eager to latch onto a few small pleasures of life. There is champagne in the shebeens, and the chef in Soweto's one hotel now sleeps proudly on a water bed. True, no one can really escape the numbing boredom of being restricted at night to what is little better than a vast labor camp. But there is a new mood of assertiveness in this huge, dispiriting ghetto, and The Children--whose goal goes well beyond such rewards--have started it.

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