Apartheid

A prominent white anti-apartheid activist was shot and killed outside his home in suburban Johannesburg, South Africa, by an assailant firing from a passing car, police said. Colleagues said they believe that David J. Webster, 44, was assassinated because of his political activities. He was shot in the back as he unloaded his van in Troyville after a trip to a garden center and bakery with a companion, who was not hurt. Webster was a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Former U.S. Rep. Howard Wolpe, a Michigan Democrat who played a key role in the 1986 passage of the federal anti-apartheid act that imposed economic sanctions on South Africa, has died. He was 71. Wolpe, who had been ill with a heart condition, died Tuesday at his home in Saugatuck, Mich., said Ken Brock, a former staff member. As chairman of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, Wolpe was a main sponsor of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which demanded the end of apartheid and mandated sanctions against South Africa for its system of white-minority rule.

This is the birth of a South African movie, at a kitchen table in suburban Johannesburg. Two black men and a white woman work a comic moment. Their voices compete, louder and faster. They backtrack and rework the scene, exhilarated, laughing. Kenneth Nkosi and Rapulana Seiphemo, screen stars in South Africa, spark as if they're lightning charged. Jann Turner sits at her laptop, eyes dancing, fingers tripping over the keyboard, trying to keep up. The film's called "Fifty Coffins.

Tutu: Authorized Allister Sparks & Mpho Tutu HarperOne: 354 pps., $29.99 -- The history of the long fight to end apartheid in South Africa had many heroes but none quite like a 5-foot-4 Anglican archbishop with an impish sense of humor who became a giant irritant to the white authorities. Desmond Tutu's gift for the art of protest politics was on sweet display one pivotal weekend in 1989, when Frederick W. de Klerk was about to be installed as president and the nation pulsed with clashes between protesters and police.

South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela ended a three-day visit here Saturday after an unhesitant embrace of Cuban President Fidel Castro's Communist revolution, which he called "a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people." "We admire the sacrifices of the Cuban people in maintaining their independence and sovereignty in the face of a vicious, imperialist-orchestrated campaign," Mandela told a rally at which he was Castro's honored guest.

The word went down hard in South Africa's largest black township, where symbols of liberation are still rare and revered. "It's a blow to us, I'll tell you," Rebecca Mofutsane, a Soweto office worker, said Friday. "We had admired her, called her 'mother of the nation.' Now the 'mother' is killing the people of the nation? It is terrible."

It's a country with a rich and complicated cinematic history. Over the years, South Africa has served as both an inspiration and backdrop for many compelling dramas, thrillers and yes, comedies too. Here are a few from decades past and present: 'Cry, the Beloved Country' (1951 and 1995) The first adaptation of Alan Paton's 1948 novel was a British production that starred two American actors -- Canada Lee and Sidney Poitier. Lee plays a poor black minister from the country who travels to the city to find his missing son. He discovers much more, including poverty and suffering caused by an institutional oppression that would later become apartheid.

The nation's 160 Wimpy hamburger restaurants today received government permission to serve all races in a special exemption from the apartheid race segregation laws.

According to your editorial, "there may be no way to contain the spreading violence, but if there is a way, it is by ending apartheid." There is no "apartheid" in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Cambodia or Thailand. At least, if there were, you have not told us. Nor is there "apartheid" in the rest of Africa where there are 24 countries on the U.N. emergency food list, where 5 million black children die of starvation each year, where genocide is a normal feature of life, where 90% of the people live under one-party regimes or military dictatorships.

Berkeley justifies its silly use of multiple boycotts based upon its "success" in helping to end apartheid in South Africa (July 22). I've got some news for the Berkeley City Council. As an L.A. native who lived in Johannesburg during those boycott years, I can say that U.S. economic sanctions did little if anything to contribute to the fall of apartheid. If anything the boycotts made South Africa more self-sufficient. When U.S. corporations divested, they simply sold out--at fire-sale prices--to rich South Africans who kept the businesses running.

In South Africa, they call him "Dr. Death. " Wouter Basson, who ran the apartheid government's secret germ and chemical warfare program, Project Coast, once was accused of trying to create poisons that were lethal only to blacks. He was acquitted by a judge in 2002 of charges that included murder and drug possession. But more than 20 years after he ran Project Coast, Basson's quiet life as a cardiologist in Cape Town is being threatened. He is facing an inquiry by the Health Professions Council of South Africa for unethical conduct.

The South African ruling party's controversial youth leader was found guilty Monday of hate speech for singing "Shoot the Boer," an apartheid-era song calling for killing white farmers. It was the second conviction under the Equality Act for Julius Malema, whose divisive rhetoric has upset people as varied as conservative whites and leaders of his own party. The law bans the use of hate speech designed to hurt or threaten any group based on race or sexual orientation. Malema, one of President Jacob Zuma's sharpest critics, is also facing an unrelated disciplinary hearing this week before the ruling African National Congress for accusations of sowing division within the party.

Bill Clements First GOP Texas governor since Reconstruction Bill Clements, 94, a two-term Texas governor who in 1979 became the first Republican elected governor in the state since Reconstruction, died Sunday at a Dallas-area hospital, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said. Clements had been in failing health for several months, his family said. "As the father of the modern-day Texas Republican Party, Gov. Clements is responsible for the growth, success and election of Texas Republicans in every corner of our state," Gov. Rick Perry said.

The struggles of black citizens in South Africa to overcome a brutal government-imposed system of race separation are right out of a history book to a student like Robert Virgen. At 15, the Santee Education Complex sophomore hadn't been born when anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela was released from decades in prison or when the country held its first multiracial elections. But when one of the heroes of that time, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, came to this downtown high school for a Black History Month celebration Thursday, Virgen said he felt a kinship that transcended time, geography and race.

This is the birth of a South African movie, at a kitchen table in suburban Johannesburg. Two black men and a white woman work a comic moment. Their voices compete, louder and faster. They backtrack and rework the scene, exhilarated, laughing. Kenneth Nkosi and Rapulana Seiphemo, screen stars in South Africa, spark as if they're lightning charged. Jann Turner sits at her laptop, eyes dancing, fingers tripping over the keyboard, trying to keep up. The film's called "Fifty Coffins.

Michael Zulu trundles a wheelbarrow along the track to his farm homestead, where chickens peck at the carpet and skinny cats curl sleeping amid the bird droppings. He's the farmer now, not just a tractor driver for a white farmer named Engelbrecht, like he used to be. But he has a shirt full of holes, the roofless ruins of a dairy and a stretch of farmland whose only crop is cow manure, bagged up and stacked against a wall as a substitute for firewood. There's no electricity on his farm, just an hour's drive southeast of Johannesburg.

Pope John Paul II decried the "terrible toll" of apartheid Friday but urged 10 visiting South African church leaders to shun violence and use "only peaceful means" to fight the racist system of segregation.

For Athol Fugard , the playwright's pilgrimage can be a long, tortuous slog. But the trek is less daunting and more companionable if that road happens to pass through L.A.'s Fountain Theatre . Since 2000, when the intimate Hollywood playhouse staged the Los Angeles premiere of Fugard's "The Road to Mecca," the 78-year-old South African playwright has regarded the Fountain as something of an artistic home away from home. It will be again starting Saturday, when the Fountain will host the U.S. premiere of Fugard's latest work, "The Train Driver," a succinct, one-act, two-character drama that deals with Fugard's pivotal theme of the last two decades: South Africa's quest to shake off the ghosts of apartheid's dehumanizing legacy.

The Rev. Nico Smith, a white pastor who challenged South Africa's apartheid system by moving with his wife into a black township in the 1980s, has died. He was 81. Smith collapsed Saturday while attending a friend's birthday party in Pretoria and died before he could be taken to a hospital, said Marita Laubscher, the eldest of his three daughters. Smith was one of a few clerics in the 1980s who left the white Dutch Reformed Church — the largest denomination among the Afrikaners who then held political power — because of the church's refusal to actively oppose apartheid.