Soweto trip report

[lethargic_man]

[As I said beforehand, there are none of my photos here, but I've put in links to photos elsewhere on the Web.]

I'd always thought Soweto was an African name, but it turns out it's short for "SOuthWEst TOwnships"; the name was the winner of a competition for the name in 1963.

I went to Soweto not really knowing what to expect. Twenty years ago, I would have imagined, the place would probably have shown deep poverty, but Berlin today does not much resemble the Berlin of twenty years ago, so Soweto should probably have moved on to. The difference is probably one of money; there's nothing like the glittering reconstructed Alexanderplatz in Soweto. Instead, the poor areas of Soweto and elsewhere remain, but the government has done its best to make them more habitable, with the limited amount of money it has had at its disposal for ameliorating the housing of the 80% of its population which didn't get much in the way of resources until twenty years ago.

For example, the "hostel" (terraced housing) in Diepkloof in Soweto was built without any form of plumbing whatsoever, but there is now an outside water fountain every 100m, and outside chemical toilets every few houses—no worse than poor areas in the north of England less than a century ago! Likewise, on the way to the airport in Cape Town I passed a shanty town (Langa, Google Maps informs me it's called) where the houses were all tin shacks, but it was all evidently very well lit at night. The lighting presumably was put in post-apartheid, and the wires connecting the lights are all at streetlight level rather than buried in the ground: it doesn't look the nicest, but it probably saved a lot of money installing it that way. (See the picture here.)

That said, not all of Soweto is poor. Some of it is very affluent. I went to an area called Diepkloof where one side of the kloof (valley) had nice middle-class houses, complete with statuary in the front gardens in some houses, yet facing the hostel referred to above across the kloof.

It's impossible to talk about Soweto without understanding the background of the 1976 Soweto uprising, when children took to the streets to protest the government's new law that all teaching had to take place in English and Afrikaans, despite these being the languages of only 20% of the populace. The impression I get is that most of the protestors were peaceful, but when some of the older teenagers started throwing stones at police, they retaliated with live fire and chased the protestors through Soweto to the Regina Mundi church, where the police followed them in, still firing. You can still see the bullet holes on the outside of the church today.

On the way, the thirteen-year-old schoolboy Hector Pieterson was caught in the crossfire and died; another student was famously photographed carrying his body. (Identified through the photograph, he himself was harrassed by the police, and fled South Africa through a succession of countries to Nigeria, where all communication from him ceased two years later—another victim, directly or indirectly, of the apartheid regime.) There is a memorial on the street now at the point where Pieterson was shot, and a museum elsewhere in Soweto, in his name, to the uprising.

It took the government almost two years to quell the protests following the uprising (and any success they had was short-lived, as protests arose again (and were put down with appalling levels of violence) throughout the 1980s).

Moving on, my tour of Soweto now took me to Nelson Mandela's house, the small bungalow where he lived until he was imprisoned, which is now a museum. After Mandela's release, he returned to live there for eleven days, which was all he could take of the constant media presence, before he moved to his wife's house. (And then he discovered that in his twenty-seven year absence Winnie Mandela had acquired a boyfriend, and moved back out of hers.)

Finally, no blog post about Soweto would be complete without a photograph of Orlando Towers, the disused power station cooling towers which have now been turned into a bungee-jumping site, and one of the largest and most colourful murals you're likely to come across anywhere.