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Throughout its tenure, the Committee of 81 had complained when the press described it as a body of "Coloured" students. All local African and Indian schools, it insisted, were also represented on the Committee. The preponderance of black students in Cape Town simply happened to be classified "Coloured."

But when the Committee of 81 decided to end the boycott, only "colored" and Indian children returned to classes. In the African townships of Cape Town, the boycott continued. Student spokesmen said the boycotters wanted to demonstrate their solidarity with the local meat workers who had been locked out. The boycott was also still in force in African schools in the Eastern Cape, in Kwa Mashu near Durban, and at the University of Fort Hare.

Leadership of the boycott in Cape Town was assumed by a student group known as the Regional Committee—but police harassment and the continued blanket ban on all meetings made it very difficult for this leadership to function. For the most part, schools were deserted. No awareness sessions were being conducted at those schools that did have students. The township streets were full of restless, idle youth. In the second week of August, when crowds gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1976 uprising in Cape Town, violence erupted. Vehicles were stoned near Crossroads (a huge squatter camp near Mitchell's Plain) and Nyanga, buildings were looted and burned, and five people were killed over several days.

The government showed little interest in getting the African children back in class. In Cape Town, the parents of boycotting students formed a Parents' Action Committee to meet with the authorities. This committee carried a mandate from the boycotting students, but the government insisted it would negotiate only with school committees and community councils—bodies long rejected by the students. The leaders of the Parents' Action Committee were soon detained, in any case. When student leaders attempted to meet in a Guguletu church, they were baton-charged where they sat by police. In the ensuing flare-up, one boy was killed and four people were wounded by police firing from inside a bus.

The anger of students in the African townships came to be directed increasingly at their teachers and principals. One night, the principal of Sizamile High School in Nyanga was watching television with his family in their eight-room house in Guguletu when a crowd

of young people burst in the door and began silently pouring gasoline on the furniture. The family fled. The house was gutted, as was the principal's new car. On the same night, the principal of Fezeka High School in Guguletu was attacked in his house by children with stones and petrol bombs. He, too, had his house burned down and barely escaped with his life. A number of teachers' houses were attacked. And the students did not seem to be alone in their animosity toward those whom they considered "collaborators." One teacher sought refuge from angry children in a house near his school, only to be beaten up by the equally hostile parents inside the house.

Nervous jokes about events in Guguletu and Nyanga got to be a staple of conversation in the staff room at Grassy Park High.

The same sorts of things were happening in many parts of the country where the boycott continued. In the Ciskei bantustan, conservative rural parents were trying to drive children back to class with sticks. A student constable was killed in one clash with police, several children in another. The principal of a junior secondary school in the Alice district was stoned to death by students. After this incident, the Ciskei Chief Minister, Chief Lennox Sebe, declared, "People must now realise that we are no longer dealing with students but with terrorists who have no consideration for human life. . . . I am convinced these children will kill their own parents." Like the other bantustan leaders, ChiefKaiser Matanzima, the ChiefMinister of the Transkei, blamed outside agitators for the school boycotts in his "homeland." Black education in South Africa had been destroyed by "Communists" who infiltrated among the people, according to Matanzima. His appeal to students to return to class had a certain pithy logic—"Where will you get education after you have been killed?" he asked.

The ongoing boycotts were occurring within a larger pattern of unrest. Every day the papers seemed to carry reports of police tear-gassing a crowd somewhere, baton-charging a school, shotgunning a child. In Grahamstown in July, a woman was shot dead in her yard by police while boycotting students marched nearby. At her funeral, a sixteen-year-old boy was shot dead, and a dozen people wounded by police gunfire. At his funeral, three more people were killed. In a township near Port Elizabeth, four children were killed and sixteen wounded by police during a Guy Fawkes Day celebration. In Guguletu, police killed two boys when they opened fire on a Saturday night crowd celebrating the victory of black American Mike Weaver over white South African Gerrie Coetzee in a heavyweight title fight.

On and on it went. Even from the "locations" near country towns, there seemed to be an unending stream of reports of children stoning vehicles, or stopping and looting bread vans, then distributing the loaves to the people. Finally, there was a great wave of industrial strikes—at the Volkswagen and Goodyear plants in the automobile manufacturing district near Port Elizabeth, at canneries and textile mills and factories in Natal and the Eastern Cape, at Sasol. Ten thousand black municipal workers struck in Johannesburg, as did the city's black bus drivers. Black workers continued to lose most battles with management, but some observers contended that this growing labor militancy was the most significant form of political resistance to flourish in the second half of 1980—even more significant than the boycotts of schools.

In September, the minister in charge of African education abruptly closed nearly eighty schools, including all eighteen African high schools and higher primary schools in Cape Town. Although most of the schools that were closed had been deserted for months, this act removed all hope of salvaging the year's work for nearly sixty thousand students. An indeterminate number of schools were closed in the bantustans, too, where hundreds of children were also reported detained for boycott activities. There had been little if any attempt by the government to address the demands made by the boycotting African students. Indeed, these demands were almost identical to those put forth in 1976, which never had been addressed.

As a result of the closings, dozens of African teachers were fired; many others were transferred to rural schools. In Cape Town, in September, African teachers suddenly had their pay withheld. "This is horrible," one teacher affected told the press. "We do not know what we have done." Again, this was the kind of thing that hit home among my colleagues at Grassy Park High, and the plight of these teachers was much discussed.

Why did African students continue to boycott after the "colored" children who had initiated the boycott were back in classes? The lack of any leadership capable of ending the boycott at African schools was often cited. A more basic reason was that conditions were simply that much worse at African schools, and in African townships. Certainly, the shattering impact of influx control on social, family, and economic life in many African townships contributed to a degree of systemic breakdown rarely seen in "colored" areas.

Did African boycotters feel abandoned by their "colored" comrades? Some undoubtedly did. In Cape Town, "coloreds" were accused

of a "lack of sincerity," and one Fort Hare expellee declared, "Those who give recognition to the system by attending classes are traitors to the nation." This condemnation was meant to apply to the many African children who had returned to classes in Natal, as well as to "coloreds" in the Cape. "Colored" student leaders were more careful in their remarks about those who continued boycotting. They were uniformly supportive, even once it became obvious that the uncoordinated, unfocused nature of the continuing boycott was badly dividing black opinion and putting no effective pressure on the government.

Most of the schools in Langa, Nyanga, and Guguletu would not be reopened until March 1981, well into the next academic year—by which time the "social effects" of the boycott had been "devastating," even according to pro-boycott reports.