Kennedy Visits Soweto, Is Told of Bleak Lives

The story was one that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy might have heard back home in Boston--the struggle of a black woman to feed, clothe and house her seven children, to get them a decent education, to see them established in life, a life better than she has known.

However, the Massachusetts Democrat was sitting in the small, four-room matchbox house of Anna Tau in Soweto, the sprawling black sister city of Johannesburg. And the talk kept coming back to apartheid, South Africa’s system of institutionalized racial separation, and the way that it compounds the Tau family’s every problem and creates more of them.

“Life everywhere, I suppose, is a struggle to keep body and soul together, but there is so much of a struggle here with this apartheid system that I wonder why the good Lord just doesn’t take my soul and not put me through anymore,” Tau said later, recounting her 20-minute conversation with Kennedy on Sunday morning.

“He wanted to know what life was like here, how we live . . . . The question, though, is how we manage to live at all. Apartheid has each and every one of us by the throat, and it lets us breathe just enough so they (the whites) can get another day’s work out of us. And things always seem to get worse, never better for us.”

Three of her seven children have finished school, Tau went on, but none can find a job.

“It’s the recession, sure, but what few jobs there are must go to whites under apartheid . . . and the quality of (black) education is so low, and kept that way,” she said, “that a young person’s future is limited even before he finishes school. He is trained to be a laborer, maybe a semi-skilled worker, at best a clerk or an artisan.”

However, the big problem is simply feeding everyone each day. “I can’t even afford to eat porridge with milk--only with hot water and sometimes with tea when I can buy that,” said Tau, a supervisor at a garment factory and the family’s only wage-earner. “Apartheid keeps our wages low--the minimum for bare survival and sometimes less--and black starvation is simply not a concern of whites.”

Similar pictures emerged at the two other black homes that Kennedy visited after attending Sunday Mass with his family at St. Pius X Catholic Church here. The senator appeared moved both by the poverty that he found in the huge ghetto city and by the spirit of its people.

‘Bravest, Most Courageous’

“I find in the visits in Soweto some of the most courageous, bravest, warmest men and women and children that I have ever met anywhere,” he said after his tour. “These are men and women who love their country, who care very deeply about it, care very deeply about the future of their families and want to see change brought about by peaceful means.”

Kennedy, who is on an eight-day visit to South Africa to focus attention on apartheid and to mobilize support in the United States for a campaign against it, was also visibly moved by his visit to a hostel for migrant laborers. Men who come to work in the city must leave their families in remote villages under a system intended to curtail the influx of blacks into white urban areas.

“This camp is one of the most distressing and despairing visits that I have made to any facility in my lifetime,” Kennedy said at Soweto’s Nancefield Hostel. “Here, individuals are caught between trying to provide for their families or living with their families.

“I don’t really know of any other place in the world where that kind of cruel, harsh, difficult choice must be made by any people who believe in family life . . . . This is alien to every kind of tradition in the Judeo-Christian ethic, and I find it appalling.”

Wilson Ngobeni, a 54-year-old laborer, who earns about $20 a week and who came to Johannesburg 20 years ago, detailed the hostel system to Kennedy--eight men to a room, shared cooking and toilet facilities, most of their pay sent back to their families and a three-week trip home each December for Christmas.

“The worst part is the loneliness,” Ngobeni said later. “Loneliness, day after day and stretching further into the future than we can see . . . . Only when I am old and dying will I be able to live with my wife and children. I want to bring them all to the city, but that is not allowed under the laws, under this system. So I must live here alone.

“But if I did not have this job, then my family would starve. What little I make and can send to them keeps my wife and five children alive. It is not enough, but they are alive, and maybe my children will have a chance.”

Today, Kennedy will visit a “black spot”--a settlement of black families who are to be moved from a farming region that has been declared a white area and resettled on undeveloped land in a tribal homeland. He will also meet in Pretoria with Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha.

The Kennedy visit has been the target of hostile demonstrations by both blacks and whites, such as those at the airport on his arrival Saturday by the Azanian People’s Organization, a militant but nonviolent group. That protest apparently caused the trip’s organizers to shift meetings with black educators and journalists from Soweto to a Johannesburg hotel. Similar schedule changes are expected later in the week to spare the senator further embarrassment.

The militant Anzanian group, which espouses the philosophy of black consciousness made famous by the late Steve Biko in the 1970s, holds that South Africa’s future must be determined by its black majority and not in collaboration with even liberal whites.