Riot at the Mai-Mai

The afternoon began like most sunny Saturday afternoons in Johannesburg. At 1 o'clock, the shopkeepers rolled up their shutters, and most of the city's white workers headed for their suburban homes or to tennis courts and golf courses. The city's Negro laborers, in no hurry to get back to their squalid quarters, repaired to the Mai-Mai, a huge, government-run beer hall that serves the only alcoholic drink legally available to South Africa's blacks, a weak brew officially known as Kaffirbeer (which Negroes often spike).

Quarrels being the order of the day at the Mai-Mai, it took only a few Kaffir-beers before the Negroes chose up sides and began brawling. Within minutes, the fracas got out of hand, and several hundred enraged natives began hurling iron beer mugs, while Negro municipal police looked on helplessly. Spilling into the street, the mob continued the battle with knives, stones and tools. Suddenly, as several Negroes staggered about with screwdrivers and knives sticking grotesquely from their backs, the crowd made an unspoken truce. Ranging themselves on either side of the street, they turned their fury on the homeward-bound whites, furiously stoned more than 50 cars and their occupants before Johannesburg police broke up the riot. Casualties: six whites seriously injured, two Negroes dead and 24 badly hurt.

An angry group of whites marched on city hall, demanding that the beer hall be moved out of the city to Negro quarters. But they got a brusque reply from American-born City Councilor Hyman Miller, an ex-mayor of Johannesburg. Snapped Miller angrily: "You can't put down racial tensions that way. The blame lies with us whites. We've failed to build up a contented Negro community. There's too much want among them. They want homes, decent lives and a stake in their land. They want opportunity and cultural uplift. Give them these things, and you won't have to move beer halls." Next day Miller was swamped with calls from whites who supported his stand. Said a petitioner sheepishly: "We never looked at it like that."

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