SOUTH AFRICA: Revolt of the Queens

When the wind is still, a strange and pungent odor rises over the pleasant resort city of Durban on the Indian Ocean. It comes usually from the tin-shanty slum of Cato Manor to the west, where, ever since the Union government forbade blacks to drink anything alcoholic other than the watery government beer served in municipal bars, Zulu women have been brewing a crude moonshine of their own. A high-power popskull made of methylated spirits, carbide, potato peels or just about anything else that will ferment, this local version of skokiaan (called gavine) is often the only source of income for the “Shebeen Queens” who make it. Last week, when the Durban city council started transferring the people of Cato Manor to a new apartheid village farther away from town, the police moved in to smash the stills before the women could take them along.

Obviously, reasoned the Queens, the government was really trying to eliminate competition against government beer. Determined to protect their pin money, 300 women, some with babies on their backs and all armed with sticks or pick handles, stormed the Cato Manor beer hall. They snatched glasses out of the men’s hands, smashed barrels, poured hundreds of gallons of government beer on the ground. When the police arrived, they set after the cops with sticks and stones.

The riots quickly spread to the Asian quarter in Victoria Street. There, less than a mile from the $60 million beach front reserved for the whites, 800 women besieged another beer hall, while at Cato Manor the mob of rioters swelled to more than 3,000. When men were seen joining the women, the police decided to open up with their Sten guns. Four Africans fell dead; 24 more were injured badly enough to be taken to the hospital.

That night, flames soared above overturned buses, clinics, community centers, shops and a library. Even an African nursery school lay in ruins, identifiable the next morning only by the charred remains of a child’s kiddy car. A burning truck hurtled off a road and crushed a passer-by to death. Around one ruined clinic, sad-faced mothers squatted in bewilderment, not knowing what to do about the sick and hungry babies strapped to their backs.

After three days, the guns and fire hoses of 500 policemen finally brought peace to Durban. But just to make sure, the Union’s Minister of Justice sent around three armored cars. In Cape Town, an M.P. rose to warn the government of South Africa about the dangers of tolerating such “rabbit warrens” as Cato Manor, where “23,000 Africans live under the most sordid conditions.”