Soweto

One evening I hired an all-in-one driver/tour guide/bodyguard to take me to Soweto for a private tour. We left Sandton and made our way through Johannesburg which looks like any other city: densely populated with tall skyscrapers, billboards, and bright lights. It was clear we were entering Soweto when the streets were “paved” with dirt, there was no industry to be seen, and the houses reminded me of the shanty towns I had seen in North India: small and made of corrugated steel, their inhabitants hanging out on the sidewalks drinking and talking to neighbors. I don’t recommend Soweto unless you are deeply interested in recent South African history. For me, before visiting Nelson M and Desmond T’s houses (they lived one block from each other), SA’s apartheid history was peripheral to American slave history and the mid-20th-century Civil Rights Movement I learned about in school, movies and print. Just like visiting Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria inspired me to ponder European migration to countries other than America, visiting Soweto raised my consciousness about civil rights movements around the world. Finally, we visited the Hector P memorial which commemorates the first person, a 13-year old boy, to die in the 1976 Student Uprising in Soweto, what had started as a peaceful demonstration against the mandate that Afrikaans (a Dutch-derived language) become the teaching medium in SA.

It was my first time in Sub-Saharan Africa – I left impressed with how gentle and welcoming, helpful and kind, the locals in South Africa are towards foreign visitors. Sandton’s slow pace and the city’s greenery contrast Jo’burg from most of the otherwise granite cities I’ve visited (Edinburgh is an exception).