Soweto

The Dec. 2 Inquirer contained a photograph of the "wall" that some journalists have suggested will "enclose" Soweto. A prefabricated concrete fence about eight feet high and slightly more than three miles long is being constructed between a residential area in the city of Soweto and a busy highway that extends from Johannesburg southward to other major cities in South Africa. The speed limit on this highway is 72 miles per hour. When construction of this safety barrier is completed, a subway pedestrian crossing and three overhead walkways will enable residents of Soweto to cross the highway in safety.

Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d, guided by black nationalists, got a glimpse of apartheid yesterday in the streets of Soweto. Men, women and barefoot children came out of their tiny tin shacks - where sometimes three or four families were living - to wave at Baker's motorcade of Mercedes-Benz sedans. In the shantytown of Mshenguville, where squatters have reclaimed an old golf course, thousands of black South Africans are forced to live without electricity or running water - even though the power lines of nearby Johannesburg run overhead.

Winnie Mandela, wife of imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, has confirmed newspaper reports that she is building a mansion in the "Beverly Hills" section of Soweto. Mandela said in an interview published in The Weekly Mail that she has been building the two-story, walled house since mid-1986 with royalties from her biography, Part of My Soul Went With Him, and money from a trust fund she said had been set up by friends. The biography is banned in South Africa.

Patrick Makhoba turned 16 the month before South African police and army officers surrounded his school in the black township of Soweto last June. They ordered him and six other black students from a classroom, stood them against a wall and, without explanation, beat them with rifle butts and kicked them. The students were taken to the Protea police station, where Makhoba was kept in solitary confinement for 38 days. Every day, he was taken to a room and interrogated. A table was pushed against his waist to hold him in place for beatings.

The South African government last night announced a ban on media coverage of events today in Soweto, where black activists say they will hold a mass funeral in defiance of a government order. The ban, announced by the nation's police commissioner, prohibits journalists from entering Soweto and from reporting on activities of the government security forces. It also prohibits journalists from being "within sight" of any unrest. The ban will mean that any reporting on possible unrest today will be limited to the version of events provided by the government Bureau for Information.

The mayor of Soweto was still at home yesterday morning. He was smoking a cigarette while sitting in his living room with his bodyguard. His house was surrounded by a 10-foot barbed-wire fence. At the front gate, a police officer stood watch with a shotgun. There are many in this black township who would like to see Mayor Ephraim Tshabalala either dead or gone. They regard him and his 28 township council members as stooges of South Africa's white government. After one councilman was hacked to death by a mob of fellow blacks last week, there were reports that council members had fled town.

Night comes quickly to Soweto. The fires from a thousand coal stoves produce a blue smoke that blots out the moon and stars. It is during the dark nights of Soweto that a person who does not wish to be found can find solace and seclusion. It is here, in the tight warren of homes that forms South Africa's largest black township, that a woman named Patience sought refuge the other night in the home of a friend. The security police are seeking Patience, just as they are seeking thousands of other blacks active in anti-apartheid causes.

Fearful of widespread violence, both from the security forces and demonstrators, nearly all residents of Soweto and other black townships in South Africa remained indoors yesterday. In telephone interviews, residents of the sprawling Soweto township nine miles west of Johannesburg said that they were apprehensive and angry about the imposition of emergency rules that prohibited them from honoring those who died in the 1976 Soweto uprising. And, they said, police aggravated the tension by random shows of firepower.

Being first in her family is not new for Tshepiso Motlafi. No one else in her family has ever finished high school. Yesterday she became the first in her family to vote. Motlafi, 21, an energetic college student who dreams of being a psychologist, got up early to go to the voting station. It seemed to her, she said, that her future depended on her voting. "You can't find many black psychologists in South Africa," said Motlafi. "And there is a reason for that. Our schools were never as good as the white schools.

Raging street battles between police and residents of the black township of Soweto left 13 blacks dead and 70 people injured in the worst outbreak of violence since emergency rule was imposed in June, authorities said yesterday. The government said that 12 of the dead were killed when they attacked police patrols with rocks or knives in two separate incidents in Soweto, a huge township near Johannesburg. The 13th victim, they said, was a black killed by other blacks. Five police officers were among those reported wounded.

They have raised their stirring voices before Nelson Mandela, the Prince of Wales, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. They have performed with Diana Ross, Bono, and Celine Dion. They have sung lush harmonies and danced to traditional rhythms at Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and the Royal Festival Hall in London. And on a cold and rainy Wednesday afternoon, the Soweto Gospel Choir from South Africa performed in the muggy gymnasium of Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility on State Road before 175 inmates.

The Soweto Kinch Quartet, which puts a radically different spin on the phrase "mad dogs and Englishmen," possesses in its style more than a little of the former and lots, of course, of the latter. But Kinch's music, both played and spoken, harks back to the newer Birmingham, the one in Alabama, as much as or more than the one he comes from across the pond. Kinch's oeuvre is as much about the blues as it is about any of the other African diasporal musics that have given him roots. In his tonality, the small, physical altoist comes off like a Brixton street urchin who was adopted by Joe Zawinul.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - The colors of Bafana Bafana, the affectionate nickname bestowed upon South Africa's national team, are lime green and lemon yellow. And the colors are everywhere. On billboards, attached to rearview mirrors, worn in jersey form by nearly everyone working in the service industry, worn by those simply excited for this event, and worn by "The Boys" themselves, who on Friday will kick off the 2010 FIFA World Cup by playing Mexico inside artistic Soccer City, the tournament's marquee venue that holds 88,460 and is located a few winding kilometers from downtown Johannesburg.

In only eight years, South Africa's Soweto Gospel Choir has prominently presented its homeland's musical riches to the world. A gorgeous blend of South Africa's considerable church choral legacy and the myriad vocal traditions native to the region - the SGC sings in six of the country's 11 official languages - the 26-member road ensemble has toured extensively. The choir performs tomorrow night in a sold-out show at the Annenberg Center's Zellerbach Theatre. Two successive Grammys for Best Contemporary World Music Album(s)

Voices raised to the rafters, and the heavens, the Grammy Award-winning Soweto Gospel Choir spreads its ministry through song. Since its founding in 2002 in Soweto, South Africa, the choir has performed for Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton. Soweto Gospel, which sings in six of South Africa's 11 official languages, also has accompanied stars such as Diana Ross, Bono and Queen. Tomorrow, the choir takes the stage here at the Kimmel Center, offering listeners the gospel, and seeking donations at show's end for children assisted through its AIDS charity.

At the start of Amajuba, Tshallo Chokwe announces, "Back home, there is nothing special about our stories, but tonight we will tell them. " Sadly, in South Africa, the five stories told by the cast probably aren't special. But here, at the Annenberg Center, they are still shocking, not least because of the universality of some of their elements. When Jabulile Tshabalala says of violence-wracked Soweto that she "hated this country where we go to more funerals than weddings in our lives," it doesn't take a great leap to land in Philadelphia, which saw nearly a murder a day in 2006.

His name was Hector Peterson; he was 12 years old. And his violent death marked the beginning of the end of apartheid. Yesterday, nearly 22 years later, President Clinton came to South Africa's most conspicuous black township to honor Peterson and countless others who gave their lives to the long struggle against white-minority rule. That an American president would visit the site that so singularly symbolizes black South African resistance was yet another sign of just how far this nation has come in the seven years since apartheid began to be dismantled.

Not many people have the capacity to shrug off eight days of testimony from nearly 40 witnesses linking them to an assortment of murders, assaults and tortures. But there are not many people in the world like Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Nelson Mandela's ex-wife emerged from an extraordinary session of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission last week unrepentant, unbowed and, for the most part, undamaged by a fusillade of testimony indicating that she directed a terroristic gang of youths during the antiapartheid struggle.

As the hearings on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela labored through a seventh day yesterday, officials suggested that she and her supporters were threatening those who would testify against her. In one example of the alleged intimidation, Archbishop Desmond Tutu admonished Madikizela-Mandela's lawyer, Ishmael Semenya, for suggesting that one witness against her had been a police spy during the apartheid years. "Even today that is almost a death sentence," said Tutu, chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The Rev. Paul Verryn sat behind his desk yesterday at the Central Methodist Mission in Johannesburg, exhausted from the sermon he had delivered - not from the pulpit, but from the witness stand. "It was good for me to be able to face Mrs. Mandela directly and it was good for me to have a chance to say to her what I said to her," said Verryn. Hours earlier, Verryn, 45, had wept as he told South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he had failed to protect a 14-year-old boy who was abducted from Verryn's house nine years ago and then beaten to death by loyalists of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.