Soweto

After nine days here, Marnie and I didn’t want Pru to leave with the impression that South African culture consists of nothing more than grilled meat, beer and rugby, so we scheduled a tour of Soweto. In recent years, Soweto has surpassed Kruger National Park as South Africa’s top tourist spot. It is the birthplace of the ANC (and Nelson Mandela as its leader), “black consciousness” and was the hub for the downfall of apartheid.

Soweto is an acronym for South Western Township, this being it’s direction in relation to Johannesburg’s City Center. Of the 3.5 million residents, only 1.5 million have formal employment. Two such gentlemen are pictured here, preparing "smileys" at a stand around the Chris Hani Hospital. That's cow head, to you and me. Yum.

Soweto contains all manor of housing, from tin shacks to mansions, and even a largely white suburb, named (rather unimaginatively) White City. The brightly colored houses pictured below were constructed by the government to obscure the former mining hostels behind, but lie unused. No one wants to pay for housing when you can squat right next door, and even if you could afford one, rampant drug use and prostitution await at your doorstep (the Nigerians fault, if you ask most South Africans).

Scattered around the area are informal settlements of tin shacks, one of which we entered with a guide. The owner was Gladys, a widow who lives there with her five children in two rooms. Though many camps illegally tap into power lines for electricity, Gladys is not so fortunate. She cooks off a butane range, has a “stove” for heat (a metal tray with an exhaust pipe attached) and all washing and bathing is done in a large plastic tub. The government provides one water tap per street and one outhouse per "home".

Slightly more upscale are the “matchstick” houses, having four solid walls and a door on a slab, with the convenience of indoor plumbing. From there you progress to middle class homes with a security fence and a yard, on up to some fairly impressive mansions. In the northern suburbs, noise restrictions and laws against butchering livestock prevent the raging day-long parties of the townships. These and other cultural differences keep many blacks in the township long after they’ve struggled their way into the middle class.

Due to its historical importance, tourism thrives in Soweto, spurring rapid growth and investment, already having the largest shopping mall and hospital in the southern hemisphere. Our guide reckons that in ten years it will be just another suburb of Joburg.