Soweto

<p dir="ltr">'Soweto' - what do you picture? My image was grim, a sprawling township, crowded, slum-like, desperate, dangerous. Visual images were from the 'children's uprising' against apartheid in the eighties, barricades burning, police only able to enter in heavily armoured vehicles, antagonizing and brutalizing. A place where blacks murdered fellow blacks suspected of collaborating with the white regime. On the plus side, the home of some of my favorite music, Township or Zulu Jive, and female groups like the Mahotella Queens with their irresistible rhythms and harmonies, but hardly a place for white tourists.
Well, as always, reality is a different place than preconceptions. Our friends David and Michelle gave us a quick tour on a Saturday afternoon. David and Steve Carver's Win-Win Group has an office in Soweto, so he knows his way around, which helps. For instance, the office is in a district considered trendy by the black business elite, a safe place to go, whereas there are neighborhoods where a parked car will likely be stolen in minutes.
So Soweto isn't monolithic; it just means 'South.West Townships', a huge area of separate neighborhoods, some fairly awful, others relatively inviting and middle-class. Not the leafy walled suburbs that we stayed in, but not the crowded shacks of the huge townships we saw outside Capetown either. Granted, we only drove around a small fraction of Soweto, but we only saw one small area of true shacks, ironically in the shadow of a huge gleaming soccer stadium, home of the Orlando Pirates, an object of fanatic devotion in parts of Soweto.
More typical were paved streets, tiny plots with tiny but decent houses on them. Some even had suburban trappings like miniature lawns. There was some infill, crowding more dwellings onto a plot. Businesses ranged from people selling a few basics out of their homes to wide commercial streets choked with cars. Soweto boasts Africa's largest taxi stand - several blocks long packed with combis, and the world's busiest KFC outlet, takeout only. Billboards promote normal middle-class products like shampoo and TV shows, not to suggest that everyone is middle class.
Parts of Soweto have become tourist draws too, especially since the World Cup in 2010 brought a lot of foreigners to Joburg. We went past the homes of Winnie and Nelson and other Mandelas, and walked around a moving memorial near the site of the shooting of the first student by police in the 1976 protests. Some residents seemed to stare or even glare at the tourists, maybe resentful that their home is treated as a curiosity, but most were friendly or at least indifferent. We didn't have time to eat or have a drink there, which Steve and David say is a must, so I guess we have to come back!  But we did have a glimpse of another unique piece of the complex quilt which is South Africa. It already seems a world away as I write this a few days later, flying over the ordered green fields of Poland en route from Amsterdam to Crete, via Stockholm...