In the darkness of a South African summer morning last week, thousands of Johannesburg policementhe whites armed with Sten guns and rifles, the blacks with clubs and spearsfiled out of their barracks and drove in 300 trucks to a narrow strip of grassland that separates the white suburb of Westdene from the crowded Negro slum of Sophiatown. The cops marched quietly into the sleeping warren. Every 20 yards a policeman took up station. "We mustn't waken these bloody Kaffirs," warned one officer. "We'll shock them well enough after daylight."
Operation Sophiatown was neither a pogrom nor a Mau Mau roundup....
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