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Nonetheless, one aspect of their lives has changed hardly at all. South African whites rarely if ever visit black townships and have only the vaguest idea of what life in them is like. Says a Johannesburg travel agent: "Foreign visitors who take the scheduled bus tour to Soweto," the sprawling black township southwest of Johannesburg, "know more about the place than do most of the city's whites." Those tours were temporarily canceled a fortnight ago after a bus carrying American, German and British tourists was stoned by youths.
Every white South African city and town, even the smallest dorp (village), has its Soweto, its KwaThema, its satellite township where the blacks live. It is where the paved road ends and the dirt begins. Asphalt highways cut through Soweto, but the side streets disappear quickly into dust or mud. In the shantytowns, children and old women gather at water points to fill plastic bottles and cans, which they balance atop their heads with hip-swaying confidence as they walk home along potholed paths. The smaller the township, the fewer the amenities. Some communities have only a few electric lights, and none in individual homes. Some have only one outside privy for a row of houses. Night soil is collected by a clanking tractor and trailer. The smoke of coal fires hangs in the air, softening the ugly outlines of the settlements behind a gray-brown veil.
Soweto is atypical, both for its size (pop. 1.2 million) and its relative sophistication. It has a well-established middle class and an unmistakable power elite. But there, as elsewhere, political ferment is accentuated by slum living, lack of amenities, overcrowding, crime and the breakdown of family life. The despair of township life, the prospect of no breakout from such confinement, is felt most keenly by the young. They hold the police in contempt; in Soweto they jokingly refer to patrolling police vehicles as "Zola Budd" and "Mary Decker," who competed at the Los Angeles Olympics, depending on which vehicle arrives first at the scene of a disturbance. Says Photographer Peter Magubane, who was raised in Soweto and has covered its life since the early 1960s: "Things are getting tougher, more clinical. If there is a protest march or a funeral procession, you will find buckets of water placed at every house along the way. That's in case there is tear gas, so the marchers can wash it from their eyes and their faces. That was not true at the time of the Soweto riots in 1976. The children have become more politicized. They have left the adults behind. The system is helping people to become united."
Residents who once looked to policemen for protection, Magubane explains, have changed their minds "after they have had their door kicked down in the dead of night, their houses invaded, their parents hauled out of bed and their relatives beaten. Right now the people here would rather deal with white policemen than black. In the '80s," he adds, "the anger is against blacks who work within the system."
Segregation underscores the differences in the way South African blacks and whites live. A middle-class black, even though he may earn a decent wage (perhaps $4,200), is forced to reside in a ghetto. A middle-class white, earning around $9,000, can live in a three-bedroom house in a pleasant suburb with a live-in maid and a small swimming pool.