World News for Students of English

11-10-2016 07:00

Thousands of protesters gathered in the streets outside South Africa’s Wits University demonstrating against higher tuition fees, but it was not long before the scenes turned an uglier colour and a peaceful protest became a war zone. The police arrived to enforce a court order against public gathering at the campus, unleashing a barrage of tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets on the crowd.

People in South Africa are frustrated, some feeling that higher education is still limited to wealthy white families over two decades after apartheid ended. When the government declared last month that tuition fees would continue to rise, tensions were perhaps destined to boil over.

University administrators warned that any further freezes to fees could damage their academic programs, but for many of the protesters, they would simply like the opportunity to learn.

Difficult words: gather (come together in large numbers), enforce (apply, carry out), unleash (shoot), apartheid (a system which is against the black population).

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