Documentary : Bitter Harvest of Apartheid on Display in Soweto : Great poverty and wealth are intertwined in a vast metropolis that is often difficult to grasp and define.

Early morning, and from a highway outside town, Soweto’s bungalows and shacks and the expansive homes of its wealthy professionals appear spread out across the land in the neat geometrical patterns conceived by its creators, like caricatures of affluent suburban neighborhoods.

Over them all hangs a permanent pall of yellow smoke, the product of half-a-million coal stoves working all night to push back the encroaching chill of a South African winter.

Soweto smog. It is one of the few unifying physical features of a place that brings together 2 million black South Africans, tin-shack squatters and millionaire entrepreneurs, cosmopolitan urbanites and rural newcomers, political maneuverers and street-corner vendors of oranges and cigarettes. Soweto is a great metropolis, busy and vigorous, as hard to grasp and define as Africa itself.

Daily life in Soweto seems misleadingly remote from the great issues of international sanctions and majority rule that Nelson Mandela is addressing on his global tour, which will bring him to Los Angeles this week.

Mandela is a Sowetan himself: The tiny house where he lived at the time of his arrest 27 years ago is well-marked by its resplendent paint scheme of green and yellow, the colors of the African National Congress. (Across the street on Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s white wall is scrawled a community message for the tour buses that regularly pass by: “Soweto Is No Zoo for White Racist Tourists.”) The new mansion prepared for Mandela by his wife, Winnie, is a landmark in the upscale Orlando quarter of Soweto.

Here in his home township can be seen the daily harvest of 40 years of South African apartheid. Overflow patients sleep on the floor of Baragwanath Hospital, the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, a place so big its administrators do not know how many beds it has. (“We are trying to count them at the moment,” says one.)

Tin-shack residents squat on government land, waiting a lifetime for a chance to buy a proper house in the chronically overcrowded township.

School principals make do with budgets that are one-sixth of what white educators get per pupil. Municipal leaders struggle to keep the streets clean and provide affordable water and power to their constituents. They cannot tax property owners or businesses as white Johannesburg can, because almost all the residential land is government-owned, and commercial activity has been discouraged and confined to tiny, isolated shops.

It was perhaps inevitable, in a sprawling community of 2 million, that some people would be able to carve out their own enclaves of privilege and graciousness. There are doctors’ and businessmen’s homes faced in brick, with wings fanning out behind large gardens and filigreed fence posts. Journeymen workers have managed to build their own five- or six-room homes on quiet streets.

But there are few places in Soweto entirely insulated from the harshness of existence. Until 1984, about 90% of its homes had no electricity. Even now most homeowners prefer heating with coal, because it is much cheaper than other fuel. Soweto’s grimy yellow atmosphere is the result. Rich or poor, Soweto’s neighborhoods are all mercilessly open to the sky under the obscuring smog, for there is scarcely a tree to provide a spot of shade from the bleaching sun.

Conditions like this are no accident. For many decades, whatever government structure or regulation was imposed, the white idea behind Soweto was always the same: “To make life unattractive for urban blacks in the hope they would go away,” in the words of one Johannesburg urbanist.

The impact can be seen in the crises that perhaps best define Soweto: health, education and housing.

The immense Baragwanath Hospital rises imposingly at one of the portals to the township. From the top floors of its new administration tower, the tallest building in the township, all of Soweto is laid out in a panorama. With a staff of 12,000, Baragwanath is the largest single employer in Soweto.

It is no cliche to say that Soweto life begins and ends in the 60-odd barracks-like wards of this place. More than 30,000 babies are born every year in the hospital and its 11 associated clinics. On a Saturday night the casualty ward is a maelstrom of broken bodies and traumatic wounds. “We get 350 people a day in here on a weekday,” says a hospital official. “On the weekends, 700 a day. If a disaster happens in Soweto, we get 2,000 patients in here all at the same time.”

Baragwanath is as chronically overcrowded as a Soweto squatters’ camp. Dr. Christo van den Heever, the hospital’s chief superintendent, repeats with a thin smile the judgment of the Rand Daily Mail after one of Baragwanath’s expansions: “No longer will mattresses have to lie on the floor.”

That was written in 1948. Although it has doubled in size in 42 years, Baragwanath has never been able to keep pace with the explosively growing township. Van den Heever says he regularly requests expansion, but the approvals are “always too little, too late.”

Part of the problem is the system of international sanctions against South Africa, which Mandela is asking to be maintained. Among the U.S. companies divesting themselves of South Africa operations as a result of the sanctions was Chase Manhattan Bank, which had been financing an expansion of Baragwanath. “The two new wards going up right now should have been built in 1981,” Van den Heever says.

The superintendent has the experience and perspective necessary to chart some important social trends in his domain. Baragwanath used to treat one or two gunshot wounds a week; with the vigorous trade in firearms outside the hospital’s doors, the figure now is closer to 100 a month. To that can be added hundreds of knife wounds.

“The life of a surgeon at ‘Bara’ revolves around trauma,” he says. “By the time a (surgical) resident leaves here, he can handle a stabbed heart easily.”

There’s more to the giant hospital than that: It can perform CAT scans and kidney dialysis. Its clinics manage to immunize 85% of Soweto’s children against the six major childhood diseases. (The hospital says the rate would be higher were it not for a steady influx of unimmunized rural children.) Until recently, when such surgery was centralized by health authorities, Baragwanath did heart transplants too.

There is no better location from which to follow the changing culture of South Africa’s blacks.

“Twenty years ago, we used to see diseases at the end stage, because people had not come in for care--enormous thyroid tumors, emaciated cancer victims,” says Van den Heever. “Now we see diseases we never did before in black Africa. They’re more like white diseases, the product of urban stress: coronary artery disease, duodenal ulcers, strokes. This is what happens when the community gets urbanized.”

Schoolchildren made Soweto a household word on June 16, 1976. That’s when police fired on a pupils’ march protesting a rule requiring the use of Afrikaans, the language of the Dutch-descended whites, as a teaching medium in their schools.

Since then, Soweto’s educational system has never run smoothly. Among the most recent incidents was a monthlong boycott of classes in March. This month, a group of Soweto parents staged a sit-in and hunger strike at the offices of the Department of Education and Training, the government ministry responsible for black schools. Their complaint was over a chronic shortage of books and supplies.

In the center of Soweto, Capheus Hlangu has no trouble understanding the parents’ complaint. The assistant principal of a secondary school with 1,200 pupils, he explains that black schools must place their book orders as far as five years ahead. Even at the start of each cycle, the supplies are inadequate. “We have maybe one book for every two pupils,” he says. “They share.” How do they do their homework, then?

Hlangu smiles wanly. “If there are problems assigned from the book, one of the two children is supposed to copy out the problems,” he says. “But they generally do not have the time to do so. You find that half the class has no homework done.”

Books get worn and overused, or they disappear as students vanish from the neighborhood and the school. “At the end of five years, you find that perhaps only the teacher’s copy remains,” Hlangu says.

A mile or two away along the treeless streets, Ephraim T. Tshabalala is involving himself in the third crisis, housing. Tshabalala gave his name to one of the biggest squatters’ camps in Soweto many years ago, when he was mayor of the township, by turning over to homeless people the land of an abandoned municipal golf course.

“They were giving birth in scrap cars,” he says today. Now the old golf course is a sub-community of 1,000 one-room shacks built around a maze of dirt paths, so tightly packed that the vast hollow seems to be fairly paved in galvanized tin.

Tshabalala is a leonine man in a brown suit and vest that accents the immense broadness of his shoulders, as wide as the sitting-room archway he stalks through to greet visitors. He halts under a faded photographic portrait of himself in his old crimson mayoral robe, and allows to being 82 years old.

“E.T.” came to Johannesburg in 1922 as a horse drover. After World War II, when there was still no meat in Soweto because it went to feed the troops, he began selling pork bones and bacon rinds. Soon he was one of Soweto’s commercial grandees. Up the block and across the street is his movie theater, named with a neon “Eyethu, “ or “Ours.” Around a corner is a strip shopping center with one of his two butcheries and a couple of other shops. Down the road is one of his three gas stations.

He also became a political boss. E.T.’s Sofasonke Party maintains a Tammany Hall-like grip on the township’s municipal council. It’s not an unalloyed testament to political skill; the fact is that most of the other political organizations in Soweto scorned the municipal elections after 1972, viewing them as a cynical maneuver by the white government. Less than 5% of eligible Soweto voters turned out for the last such experiment in self-government.

Tshabalala’s complicity in this arrangement does not keep him from having a good rant at the white officials who maintain administrative control of Soweto; the position of city clerk, to take one example, is a white sinecure, and a powerful one.

“The white officials are the biggest stumbling block to the progress of Soweto,” he says. “They’re the bastards. You can’t tell them what to do, even if you’re a councilor.”

On this day, Tshabalala’s own ox is being gored. He complains that the white administrators have turned down a plan of his to build 300 new houses, selling for $8,000-$12,000 each, on an old railroad right-of-way that cuts through Soweto.

“It’s a railroad, they tell me,” he fumes, keeping on his feet the better to pace. “I said, ‘The railroad’s built, nobody’s going to use this land anymore.’ They just want to delay, so in five years they can give the land to their white brothers to build on.”

You won’t hear William Pikoli rant about white oppression, but you won’t see him occupying a seat on a white-manipulated city council, either. Pikoli was one of the people who left the Soweto administration after the municipal changes in 1972.

Pikoli is a man with a cheerful, ironic smile who is a walking Soweto history lesson. His arrival here was a product of the old, despised Pass Law, which required every black to give a good reason for being and living in the city. His reason was his job: engineer at a Johannesburg chemical plant.

In 1946, he moved into “a very comfortable house in Kliptown,” a settlement then on the far side of the railroad tracks from Soweto proper. He was soon informed that he was violating the law: If he worked in Johannesburg, he had to live in Johannesburg, i.e., Soweto. Kliptown was just over the city line. Pikoli crossed the tracks and built a house in Dube Village, the first up-market neighborhood in the big township.

Pikoli muses from a plastic-covered sofa in his cozy living room. The latest Soweto Day, June 16, was a tranquil celebration of riots that were 14 years in the past.

“People are cooling down now,” he says. “But there’s something lacking.” Like any experienced civic official, he views South Africa’s future in terms of the daily life of his old constituents.

“The new people will take over,” he says of the prospect of black-majority rule. “Then we’ll re-amalgamate with Johannesburg. Then services around here will get a lot better.”