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That role is filled at the moment by the SSRC. Since the June riots, it has three times tried to force Soweto's 250,000 workers to stay home in a show of solidarity with student protests, but with only limited effect. Too many Sowetoans live too close to poverty to risk losing even a day's pay. The current mourning campaign has been more successful. SSRC plans its next show of strength this week, when Soweto's schools are scheduled to reopen. It has vowed to keep the township's 180,000 children home to protest the poor quality of primary and secondary education—free and compulsory for South Africa's whites but only optional for blacks, who must pay annual school fees of around $75.
Last week the government promised free textbooks for most black schoolchildren by 1978, and Soweto's parents and "Mayor" Thebehali hope the students will relent and drop the boycott. But SSRC is adamant. "We understand our parents' anguish," says a Soweto high school senior named Michael, who, as a known SSRC sympathizer, is on the run from the police and sleeps in a different house every night. "We know as well as they do that education is the tool of our liberation in the long run but not the second-class schooling we get under the Bantu Education Act. We must keep up the pressure to force the whites to give us the same education they have."
American Heroes. Since he too is wanted by the police as an SSRC agitator, another student, Shadrack, 17, met me in a remote section of Soweto. "We are not a bunch of bomb-throwing radicals," he insisted. "Because we struggle for a decent education, the authorities call us Communists. What rubbish! My heroes are not Marx and Lenin. They are Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Our campaign is peaceful, non-Communist and nonviolent. How many police have been killed in this bloodshed? Three? That should prove which side is the violent one." (Officially, the SSRC has deplored firebombings buttressing its boycott.)
Soweto's white police commander, Brigadier Jan Visser, has promised that when the schools reopen this week, his men will be "circumspect, not interfere with the educational process and confine [themselves] to controlling criminal elements." But the authorities are committed to keeping schools open for any students who want to defy the boycott. If SSRC tries intimidation to keep children away, Pretoria is likely to counter with its tough, heavily armed and mostly white riot police. It was the presence of riot police in Soweto last June that enraged student protesters and ultimately led to the shootings. If police turn up again in the township, Soweto may have still more reason for mourning.