MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Johannesburg

BREAKING THE CHAINS

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, April 3, 1994

JOHANNESBURGAgainst a backdrop of hope and fear, a nation’s epic march toward democracy has entered a bloody home stretch.

The people of South Africa—including, for the first time, the majority black population—will go to the polls later this month and alter the course of their bitter history.

They will elect a new national government and officially close the door on apartheid—the code of racist law by which some 5.6 million whites kept 24 million blacks and others of mixed race in symbolic chains for nearly half a century.

“It’s a liberation election that finally puts the beast of apartheid in the grave,” said Larry Shore, a Hunter College professor who, like many white activist South Africans, left the country long ago out of fear or disgust.

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UNEASY CALM IN EYE OF S. AFRICA STORM

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, April 3, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—The epicenter of the violence that rattled this city last week remained a place of frayed nerves and bullet-riddled glass yesterday.

Outside the headquarters of the African National Congress Party, a security guard quickly confronted two visitors who stepped beneath the red and white tape strung chest high along the sidewalk.

Seemingly out of nowhere a car with three men wearing sunglasses and looks of suspicion pulled up to the curb.

Once convinced the visitors came in peace, the guard relaxed enough to talk about the violent moments that led late last week to a war-like state of emergency being declared in the Natal province—the Zulu heartland.

“The shooting here lasted only five minutes,” he said, standing beside the display window commemorating the upcoming all-race elections.

“Over there,” he added, pointing across Plein St., to a 12-story apartment building. “Snipers started firing. And if there’s trouble again, I will know what to do.”

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MANDELA—BORN TO RULE

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, April 3, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—He carries himself like he was born to power—and he was, 75 years ago, in a hut at the bottom of the African continent.

His family ran the village; a cousin, with whom he lived while a teen, was chief of the surrounding region. Under a stand of eucalyptus trees that was the tribal courthouse, they prepared Nelson Mandela to follow in their footsteps.

“The genesis of my ideas is under these trees,” said the Old Man, as he is known among his followers, during a homecoming last month.

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FEAR STALKS THE LAND_‘Whole country has gone mad’

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers, Wednesday | April 6, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—The looming national election has laid a new carpet of fear across this already traumatized and hyper-vigilant society.

With three weeks to go, gun stores and food stores are running out of weapons and non-perishable food, and many whites are bailing out—for the duration of the campaign and its uncertain aftermath, if not for good.

“The whole country has gone mad,” said the owner of a gun store in the seemingly non-violent suburb of Birnam, as he busied himself with customers unhappy to learn that his stock of weapons was practically depleted.

“All I’ve got left are some old M-1 rifles,” he said, as he showed an elderly white man how to load a shotgun the man had brought to the store. “The demand has outstripped my supply. It’s the same all over.”

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VISIT TO SOWETO_INSIDE THE NECKLACE Pointless deaths but real victims

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers, Wednesday | April 6, 1994

SOWETO—He was an unidentified man, a weekly newspaper reported, and lucky for him that the police and paramedics came along when they did.

He was walking past the Dube Hostel, a decrepit barracks-like encampment where the so-called Zulu royalists live, when a man from the hostel came up and shot him in the face as the day sank toward night.

“Bastards!” he screamed, through his fractured jaw.

But the shooter and some other Zulu royalists were not finished. They wrapped the man in plastic, put him in a cardboard box, doused the box with gasoline and set it afire.

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VISIT TO SOWETO_A tormented past, uncertain future Poverty, violence crowd out hopes

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Sunday, April 10, 1994

SOWETO—Seeing this famous black township brings to mind ruins of war, of battle just done.

On nighttime approach—home to the Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, and Tswana tribes—the flames of random trash fires send millions of sparks into an eerie sky heavy with the stench of rotting animals.

This is Soweto—land of misery, despair, and heartbreak, of senseless deaths, crushing poverty, frightening crime and urban squalor.

Funeral parlor owners have the most lucrative business, the most beautiful homes and affluence that rival that of Johannesburg’s wealth white suburbs.

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Blacks live in N.Y.—that’s no put on

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Monday, April 11, 1994

  • JOHANNESBURG—This is a time and a city for keeping a journal:

Yes, Princess, New York is in the U.S.A. and black people live there.

Most black South Africans have had little contact with American blacks, so little that Princess Mgwebi, a security officer at a hospital in the black township of Soweto, was astonished last week when a black reporter from New York introduced himself.

“I didn’t know there are black people in New York,” she said.

Told that indeed black people live in New York and all over the U.S., her jaw dropped. “New York is part of the United States?” she said, wrinkling the vertical facial scars that indicated she was of the Ndebele tribe.

“Yes, and many blacks live there.

“Well,” Mgwebi said, not entirely sure she was not being put on. “I know there are blacks in the United States because that is where Michael Jackson is from, and I know he is black.” Read More

Deal to Bring Zulus into Election Nears

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writers | Tuesday, April 19, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—South African leaders appear to be the on the brink of a breakthrough agreement that would bring the Inkatha Freedom Party into next week’s historic election.

During talks in Pretoria involving Inkatha leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, President F. W. de Klerk and African National Congress officials, Buthelezi dropped his demand for an election delay, a government source said. The Zulu leader conceded that a postponement was impossible because of opposition from the ANC and government.

Buthelezi and de Klerk were to discuss the proposal today with ANC leader Nelson Mandela.

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Pact in South Africa Zulu Party to Take Part in Election

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writers | Wednesday, April 20, 1994

PRETORIA—In a last-minute about-face that won him little more than he was offered 10 days and dozens of political killings ago, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi yesterday agreed to take part in next week’s first all-race election.

With Buthelezi and his Zulu-based party on board, the biggest obstacles to a free and fair election across the country—and the threat of civil war among 8 million Zulus—appear to have fallen by the wayside.

“It is my deepest hope this agreement will bring an end to violence,” President F.W. de Klerk said during a dramatic joint press conference here.

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DEMOCRACY MAY BE FACING A DIFFICULT BIRTH

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, April 24, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—After living much of her life with the perverse indignities of apartheid, voting in South Africa’s historic first all-race elections this week comes down to one thing for Louisa Rakale:

“I’ll vote if somebody comes to take me to the polling station,” the 85-year-old Soweto grandmother said.

By the reckoning of racial separation laws that governed their lives, Rakale and her sisters Jeanie Khali, 86, and Alsie Makgamele, 87, were born “colored” to a white (Scottish) man and a black (Xhosa) woman.

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