We had a day and a bit to spare before we caught our flight back from Johannesburg to Australia. I decided to take a tour of Soweto. Armand from the Avant Garde Lodge made some phone calls and an appointment was made to meet a guide at the front of the motel.
Pieter arrived in a fairly new and comfortable van and we were off. We drove across Johannesburg to this city which had been involved with race riots and the start of the downfall of Apartheid.
I was surprised how close to Johannesburg it was. It was basically a suburb.
My next surprise was to find it was not all a shanty town. All the residents are black and mostly Zulu. In the more affluent areas there are millionaires with Mercedes and BMW motor cars. Just like any city there are areas where middle class people live, but yes there are squatter slums. In no areas were there security fences like in the rest of Johannesburg, only privacy fences for the wealthy. There is next to no crime in Soweto anyway. Criminal acts are dealt with by the local tribal leaders.
Soweto has the largest hospital in the Southern Hemisphere. We passed it while going to the Hector Pieterson Museum. In 1976, previous protests over the white government's demands that the language in schools be Africaans, culminated on 16th June when 10,000 students marched from Naledi High School towards Orlando Stadium. Police opened fire and 23 people were killed. The first to die was 15 year old Hector Pieterson. A vivid photo of his body being carried through the riotous streets has been used as a symbol of that day which marked the beginning of the end of Apartheid.
We drove on to Vilakazi Street and the houses of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Desmond Tutu still uses his house occasionally. He stopped using it as a permanent residence when a restaurant catering for tourists as well as locals was built next door. Vilakazi Street is noted for being the only street in the world where two Nobel Prize winners have lived.
Nelson Mandela's former wife Winnie lives a few blocks away. Nelson Mandela's present wife is noted as being the only woman in the world to have been married to two presidents - Nelson Mandela and Samora Machel, a late president of Mozambique.
We then drove to a squatter slum. Pieter told me he was the only guide taking people into the slums. Most white tourists were too scared to go there anyway. As we approached all I saw was corrugated iron shanties. The streets were dirt with streams of filthy looking water flowing down them. Then I noticed that the residents were happy and smiling, reasonably well dressed, and looked healthy and well fed.
I saw no beggars, but I guess other than for the occasional tourist like me, there was no one to beg from.
I was introduced to Xolanie, my young black guide for the next hour. He showed me through his home. It was a clean, single room with a double bed where three females slept. Males slept on mattresses on the floor. There was a vinyl two seater lounge, a TV, and a refrigerator. The TV wasn't switched on, and I wondered how they were powered. I saw no electricity services. The wood combustion stove was used only as a shelf for the paraffin stove they actually used.
Then we went to the pub. It was another sheet iron shanty of indeterminate size and shape. I tried the local home brew which tasted a bit like Fijian Kava.
There is no water to the houses, only several community taps where water is collected in pots and buckets etc for domestic use. There is no sewage. There was a row of porta-loos outside the entrance to the area. They were all locked because people at the nearby shopping centre used to use them and leave them in a mess.
Certain people within the camp had keys and handed them out as required. This must have been a problem when anyone just had to go quickly, especially at night.
We walked a little further to the school. I was shown a classroom, the library where the books are donated by businesses, and the administration building. There were some T-shirts for sale, but I will be dead before I run out of the T-shirts I own now. I just gave Xolanie a donation, thanked him, and went back to the motel with a much better educated idea of Soweto than I had before.
John Brinkley, aka The Last Picasso, is an over 50's Baby Boomer, traveller, sailor, and writer. My website http://www.sosimpleholidayswaps.com and blog http://www.sosimpleholidayswaps.com/blog include stories and photos of my wife and my travels including experiences and advice for fellow mature travellers. Countries visited include: Antarctica, Australia, Brunei, Japan, Thailand, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Egypt, USA, Argentina, Indonesia, Fiji, Greece, India, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Singapore.
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