Doctors darting
From place to place
With harried nurses at their side.
So it's Friday night.
Everybody's enjoying
In Soweto
−Oswald Mtshali,
Sounds of a Cowhide Drum
Even on Friday night−payday−there's not much to enjoy in Soweto. Into a 35-sq.-mi. area are packed perhaps a million people−650,000 by official count−and life is hard and bleak. Soweto is Johannesburg's Harlem, a black ghetto that has sprawled into the country's fourth largest city.
Very little is pretty about Soweto, not even the name (which rhymes with potato). It derives from no tribal dialect but from "southwestern township,"...