Word: apartment
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nominally independent, seven are in transitional stages on the road to autonomy. But that road is fraught with difficulties. Only three of the homelands, Ciskei, Qwaqwa and KaNgwane, are unitary territories; the rest are fragmented enclaves, surrounded by land reserved for whites. Only Transkei possesses a deep-water seaport. Apart from BophuthaTswana and Lebowa, which have rich mineral deposits, the rural homelands lack exploitable resources. Their inhabitants are engaged mainly in subsistence-level farming, while about half of the men are forced to migrate to South Africa in search of employment...
...most outside observers, that dream seemed more like a mirage. The mango-patch "republic" (pop. 480,000) is unlikely to win recognition from any nation apart from South Africa, Zimbabwe Rhodesia, and its fellow black homeland states of Transkei and BophuthaTswana, which obtained "independence" from Pretoria in 1976 and 1977. The fragility of Venda's new status was even reflected in its stage-prop capital, Thohoyandou ("head of the elephant"). Pretoria had hastily fitted out the town for the occasion with a cluster of government buildings, a hotel, a supermarket and the stadium...
...Three years of this and still no light at the end of the tunnel. The bands multiply like poor people and we just can't deal with it. We sure as hell can't sign them all, and who can tell them apart anyway--they're peas in a pod. Total industry sales are down for the first time in ages...
Studies by our psychiatric staff in laboratories miles apart indicate that these lyrics, taken from the album Fear of Music by Talking Heads, foster feelings of paranoia, confusion and even suicidal tendencies among the teens who listen to it. Furthermore, the snarling, guttural singing style of the group's lead singer--Mr. David Byrne--along with the hypnotic, repetitious, electronically treated music the group provides, could provoke listeners with extant mental imbalances to acts of violent destruction. The same group, in fact, performed a song called "Psycho Killer" on an earlier album...
Footnote-minded historians, to be sure, try to keep alive even the most obscure human misadventures. Yet certain cases thrive quite apart from the historical impulse that might keep them stirring in the public imagination. It is not mere fascination with history that has kept the British forever trying to solve the murders by Jack the Ripper in 1888, or Americans perennially intrigued with the fate of Amelia Earhart, the aviation heroine whose plane disappeared in the Pacific in 1937. Various speculations have made butcherous Jack out to be a perverted prince of British royalty or a deranged midwife...