Johannesburg’s other Side of Town

This is an auspicious street. 

Within 100 metres of each other are the homes where two Nobel Peace Prize winners lived.

School has just finished for the day and the smartly uniformed students mill in the street, talking about the day’s events.

On the corner near a simple shop, another group of teenagers busks in the warm sun, singing and swaying to African rhythms and casting a veil of lyrical song over the neighbourhood. Eager street vendors display their colourful wares to the passing visitors.

The street rises up a gradual hill lined with neat but simple houses and a gentle smoky haze softens the afternoon light. The colour on the walls of the homes is slightly faded by the haze but the fading light is strong enough to read the words on a memorial just a few metres from where three teenage students engage in conversation.  

This is Soweto – the black township, on the outskirts of Johannesburg where the sins of supremacy and the power of resistance have left a deeply scarred legacy which is the foundation of modern life for over 2.5 million South African residents.

Today’s Soweto is shaped by the hideous events of the last century but nourished by the hope and determination that prevails in this millennium.

Like any massive, sprawling suburb, Soweto has it’s good parts and bad parts. There are hundreds of thousands of modest, homes referred to as ‘matchbox’ homes and there are larger more affluent homes, with gardens, lawns and paved driveways. But mostly the homes are poor – very poor. Many pockets of abject poverty still exist where electricity and running water are looked upon as something befitting a dream home.

Soweto is divided into 26 sections or suburbs. One suburb is Orlando where a new multi million dollar shopping mall has recently opened. The familiar neon logos of Woolworth, Pick ‘N’ Pay and Shoprite blaze from the massive building like a beacon of fluorescence. Looking at the mall from the wide road which links Pretoria to Johannesburg, it’s as homogenised as Chatswood or Chadstone. The juxtaposition of its form against a background of poverty is not what you expect to see in Soweto.

Opposite the shopping centre, unemployed tradespeople set up shop on the gravel verges in makeshift workshops or salons. Panel beaters, hairdressers, butchers and motor mechanics vie for precious retail space on the street in the shadow of a disused power station, the funnels of which are adorned with murals celebrating black South Africa’s most famous son, Nelson Mandela.

On Vilakazi Street, just a peace prize’s throw from Desmond Tutu’s original home is a nondescript, two bedroom, brown brick home where Mandela lived prior to his 27 year imprisonment.

The home is simple, unattractive at best, and enclosed behind an unwelcoming metal fence. It’s dull grey form sits under a small shading tree. The home’s simplicity is the deep-rooted symbol of greatness and astonishing achievement. That the lives of so many millions of black Africans have been changed by the spawn of a collection of nondescript brown bricks is overwhelming.

While Soweto’s Mandela stands as the icon of peace and progress, Hector Pieterson is remembered as the unwitting and tragic figure of resistance demonstrated in the Soweto uprisings of 1976.

Killed by the gunfire of police when assembled in protest to the imposition of the Afrikaans language in schools, Hector Pieterson’s bloody death was the catalyst for weeks of tragic unrest characterised by hundreds of deaths, but led to a new era of freedom.

He was thirteen years old.

The Hector Pieterson Museum in West Orlando, Soweto, is a moving, chilling and poignant reminder of the deeply scared history of the Soweto Uprisings. Graphic images, compelling archive footage and walls of humbling text perpetuate the legacy his death has left. There is no more horrendous image that that of a mother carrying her slain child in her arms, yet that very image is boldly displayed throughout the museum.

A visit to the Hector Pieterson memorial and museum is a reflective experience that evokes an unprecedented and unexpected emotional response to the history of our own time.

Evelyn is a woman in her forties who proudly lives in the poorest part of Soweto, in a two room house no larger that the small caravans that line the beach of Rosebud. She shares the house with her four teenage children. She has no electricity, no water or sanitation but she has a broad smile. She demonstrates her paraffin stove and how she prepares the meals that are served at the table which has only four chairs in the centre of the main room. “When the meal is finished”’ she says “The children do their homework here”

Inside Evelyn’s home is a collection of basic furniture – one bed, a mattress and the table. There is also a wheelbarrow and tin hipbath hanging from the wall next to a towel. She willingly opens her house to visitors and although doesn’t ask for anything, survives on the few rand left by tourists.

When asked if she likes living in Soweto her response is a definite “Oh yes, I have everything here”

Soweto is a city of symbols and symbolism. Landmark homes where Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu lived and still visit, sites where the lives of children like Hector Pieterson and Hastings Ndlovu were sacrificed and streets such as Vilakazi which gently reflect an ignominious chapter of history are the statement of Soweto’s beginnings.

Evelyn’s smile, the bright new shopping mall and the residents’ willingness to share the neighbourhood with white visitors are the symbols and characteristics of today’s Soweto.

A Special on location report from South Africa by Kevin Moloney