Yesterday I made my first trip to Soweto. A large region to the south west of the Jo’burg CBD (Soweto is an English shortening of South West Townships), Soweto is a vast collection of suburbs bordering the city’s gold mining belt. To get there from my home in Braamfontein you drive first through the maze of city streets and alleys, then between the enormous gold mine dumps that dominate the southern horizon, and finally past the garish Good Reef City casino and theme park and you’re there.
It is hard to describe Soweto because it covers such an enormous area and each part of it is so different. Visitors to South Africa, like myself, often imagine it to be like the slums of Delhi or Nairobi, and certainly some of the informal settlements in Soweto are not dissimilar – collections of tin shelters with no electricity, sewerage or running water – but much of it looks like the suburbs elsewhere in the city. While it certainly isn’t Sandton (to the north of the city and apparently the richest square mile in Africa) there are now people in Soweto who are doing very well for themselves. As our guide Tania explains, those who make it good in Soweto don’t usually move, they just build a bigger house – usually on top of the one they already have.
Soweto is significant as the home of a large proportion of the Jo’burg population, as well as the focal point for much of the struggle against apartheid. Places such as Klipsburg, Orlando West and Vilakazi Street will ring in the minds of South Africans, and many others, for a long time yet. Soweto was the place to which many black communities were forcibly removed when their residence in designated ‘white areas’ was deemed no longer acceptable. Apart from housing, nothing else existed in Soweto. There were no shops, no services, no public spaces – nothing that could make Soweto a functioning, self-sustainable community. There was no electricity, but for the enormous military strength spotlights that still stand over every second block and which kept Soweto in almost permanent daylight. Much of the industry which was formerly in the east of the city was moved to the south, because that’s where the workers now lived.
Perhaps most notoriously Soweto was the site of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, which is now commemorated annually with a national holiday on June 16. When police opened fire on protesting school children, marching in opposition to the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974 which mandated that all education be in English and Afrikaans, the ensuing riots resulted in many hundreds of deaths and is sometimes marked as a turning point in the attitudes of many white South Africans to the apartheid regime. Tania is incredulous: ‘Why was it not until police started shooting children that people started to think maybe something was wrong?’ And still, it would be almost another 20 years before the apartheid regime was finally dismantled.
But there is much to celebrate in Soweto too. Freedom Square in Kliptown is where the Congress of the People famously, and in spite of intense police pressure and multiple arrests, signed the Freedom Charter – a document demanding equal rights and governance by the people and the basis of the country’s subsequent Constitution. Vilakazi Street was the home of both Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Tutu still lives there, his home surrounded by a simple grey wall at the end of the street, and Mandela’s former residence has been turned in to a museum. And the streets are becoming more and more colourful, owing to some creative graffiti artists, public art initiatives and the fact that sign writing, a lost art in many big cities, continues to thrive in Soweto.
It would be a mistake to see these developments as an indication that there is not a lot of work still to be done. As we drive past a small informal settlement, squeezed in between the new apartment buildings, I could not help but remember the ferocious storms of a few nights ago and wonder whether the people living there got even a moment’s sleep at all. And on our return to the city we pass the Baragwanath Hospital, apparently the third largest hospital in the world and with the largest burns and trauma departments in Africa. Doctors from the UK and Europe come here to learn, because in one night at ‘Bara’ they see more stab and gunshot wounds as they are likely to see in a year at home.
 |
| The road to Soweto - paved by gold mine dumps |
 |
| The sculpture at the entrance to Vilakazi St spells out the name in sign language |
 |
| Graffiti art near Vilakazi St |
 |
| A wire sculpture depicting the confrontation between protesting students and police that triggered the Soweto Uprising |
 |
| Protest seems still to be a part of the Sowetan culture. In the few hours I was there I saw separate protests against police corruption, the current Secrecy Bill (which proposes to make all government information classified) and the violence at Marikana mines. |
 |
| Hungry? Get your fix at the General Dealer |
 |
| Haircut - Soweto style |
 |
| Informal settlements such as this exist in Soweto and other parts of Johannesburg. The government has vowed to 'eradicate' them, but others argue that this will never happen and the government should instead invest in infrastructure to support them and make them safer. |
 |
| One of the military grade surveillance lights that kept Soweto in constant daylight during the Apartheid regime and before electricity was installed in neighbourhoods |
 |
| RDP Housing - built as part of the ANC's Reconstruction and Development Program, aimed at addressing the socioeconomic problems that resulted from the struggle against Apartheid. |
 |
| Graffiti at the now defunct Orlando Power Station |
 |
| Owing to the expense of billboard advertising in Soweto, sign writing is the most common form of advertising in the district. Renting out a wall is a common way for Sowetans to earn extra income and the practice is keeping the art of sign writing, now pretty rare elsewhere, alive in Soweto. |
 |
| The very new (and very vibrant!) Soweto Theatre |
No comments:
Post a Comment