SOWETO, South Africa -- This ramshackle black township is (( not much to look at, but it has an epic story to tell.

It was in this crucible of change that today's democratic South Africa was forged. Here was where whites honed their expertise in repression, and blacks developed their will to resist. Here is where the advance and retreat of apartheid can be traced step by step. Here is where black culture found a haven and black consciousness took hold.

Yet, for all the heroes, martyrs, visionaries, bloodshed and violence Soweto has known, it has had until now no formal history.

The record has finally been put straight with the book publication and six-part television series of "Soweto -- A History," by Philip Bonner, professor of urban and labor history at the University of Witwatersrand, and Lauren Segal, historian and TV producer. South African TV is broadcasting the series.

The history shows that this country's struggle to overcome its colonial and racist past was, more than anywhere else, played out here.

The discovery of gold in the mid-1880s on the stretch of high veld known as the Rand brought both white and black fortune-seekers. Within 10 years the original mining camp had grown to a roistering shantytown of 100,000.

By the turn of the century, Johannesburg began to take on the trappings of a proper city, with permanent commercial buildings and palatial homes for the mine owners. White miners married, started families and moved to the new suburbs.

Black miners were forced into short-term labor contracts and housed in squalid, single-sex barracks. They also had to carry a "pass," detailing their contracts and enabling the authorities to control their movements.

As African laborers and domestic workers flooded into the city, the government created three separate living areas for Africans, Indians and Muslims. These soon became disease-ridden slums. After a 1904 outbreak of bubonic plague, the council burned down the inner-city homes of 1,358 Africans and 600 Indians. The blacks were relocated to Klipspruit, nine miles southwest of the city and the site of modern Soweto.

But many blacks, facing a daily cattle-truck commute to work, resisted the move and remained in the slums. In the 1930s, the government introduced the first of a series of acts that sowed the seeds of apartheid, forcibly clearing the slums.

The new site for blacks was Orlando, built of identical two- or three-bedroom homes, with little ground and fewer amenities. It is the center of today's Soweto. Although no paradise, it started a trend toward more permanent residence by blacks, reflected in the increasing ratio of black women to men in the Johannesburg area. From 1 to 12 in 1900, the ratio grew to 1 to 3 in 1939 and reached parity in 1967.

During World War II, in which South Africa fought alongside Britain against Nazi Germany, there was no money for new housing. The waiting list in Orlando grew from 143 in 1939 to 16,000 in 1945 at war's end. Homeowners accommodated relatives and friends in shacks built in their tiny yards. To this day, subtenants crowd into Soweto's older areas.

The living conditions inevitably provoked political unrest and the emergence of squatter camps, where the homeless seized land and built shacks of corrugated iron, wood or cardboard. The council reacted by evicting the squatters, who simply moved to the next plot of land.

It was against this background that the Afrikaner Nationalist Party, campaigning for racially segregated cities, was voted into office in 1948. Immediately, the new government tightened controls on black workers, turned black property freeholds into 30-year leases and limited the locations where blacks could live. The apartheid era had begun.

A competition was launched to name the mushrooming townships outside Johannesburg. Among the proposals: Black Bird's Bunk, Darkiesuburban, Darkest Africa, Kethollo (Segregation), and Kwantu Thinavhuyo (We have nowhere to go).

The council committee eventually played it safe, opting in 1963 for "South-Western Townships," or, abbreviated, Soweto.

In the mid-1960s, the government began relocating blacks into Bantustans, or homelands. In 1968, it ended homeownership rights in Soweto, depriving 10,000 householders of their domestic security.

"The very process of tightening and restructuring apartheid institutions had generated social forces that would lead to their destruction," wrote Bonner and Segal. Prime among these was the black-consciousness movement, which began to grip the youth of Soweto.

On June 16, 1976, the police confronted a student protest march, and, without warning, opened fire at the youngsters. First to fall was Hector Petersen, 13. Enraged, the students ran amok, setting fire to government offices, municipal beer halls, buses and cars.

The official death toll was 23, with hundreds injured. Today the Hector Petersen memorial in the heart of Soweto is a place of pilgrimage for foreign visitors. President Clinton visited it during his African tour this year.

Riots subsequently broke out in townships across the country. Soweto youngsters flocked to the underground Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military branch of the banned African National Congress. Guerrilla raids against government targets increased from 1977.

As popular resistance grew, then-President Pieter W. Botha declared another state of emergency in 1985, giving the police and army virtually unlimited powers, including the right to arrest any student not in school during class hours.

In four months, 1,400 people were detained in Soweto. Several teen-agers were killed, allegedly by police.

In the late 1980s, a rent boycott spread through Soweto and 50 other townships. Its success was followed by a defiance campaign. Sowetans sought treatment at "white" hospitals, rode "white" buses, confronted segregation wherever they found it.

"Apartheid was in crisis," says the history, recording that the government of Botha was forced in the late 1980s to embark on radical reform. The Mixed Marriages Act, which outlawed interracial union, was abolished, and previously whites-only public facilities, including beaches, parks and toilets, were opened to blacks. Most important, the hated pass laws were repealed.

On Feb. 2, 1990, President F. W. de Klerk announced that black political parties were to be unbanned, and nine days later Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Like the rest of black South African communities, Soweto rejoiced.

Eight years later, Soweto is an eclectic city within a city, where squatter camps exist next to smart suburbs. It is troubled by crime and avoided by most white South Africans.

But it has become an unlikely tourist attraction for foreigners, an estimated 1,000 of whom come daily to glimpse township life.

Soweto, after its years of trial and tribulation, still has more than its share of problems, but it also has new prospects.

Pub Date: 9/22/98