New York, July 2—The figures are not all in on South Africa, and it may be that, like the figures involving the rioting Mexican students of 1968, they won’t ever be complete. But the last count showed that all of two white people were killed, and that therefore the rest of the casualties (133—again, at last count) were black.
It is not yet clear how many of these were black policemen; not clear how many of them were people killed by black or white policemen; and not clear how many were blacks killed by rioting blacks. That there were many of these is neither a) doubted, nor b) commented upon. Even though many newspapers featured, on page one, a picture of an automobile overturned by the rioters, not-so-neatly decapitating the (black) driver, who was not a policeman. And there were other stories of, for instance, black women hurrying home after work in Johannesburg, grabbing a stick so that, on entering Soweto, they would be accepted as anti-white militants. “Otherwise,” one of them was quoted by the wire services, “they’ll kill me, because they’ll think I was sympathetic with the whites.” In short, although the disruption was ignited by resistance to a white order (that the local schools teach Afrikaans to the black natives), the principal victims were blacks. Not only blacks killed and wounded, but black enterprises burned, black hospitals and libraries destroyed.
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