July 22, Soweto and the Apartheid Museum

Day one touring Johannesburg, Equoli – the city of gold. I began this morning by dropping off my laundry at the laundry spot. Clean clothes for less than $15.00 – works for me. The hotel wanted that much to clean just a pair of jeans. Then I had probably the best hotel breakfast in South Africa. There was even an omelet bar.

We loaded up the bus at 9:30 and headed to the Apartheid Museum, which is ironically next door to an amusement park. The museum had a special exhibit on Nelson Mandela, which covered a lot what I already know from reading his book, Long Walk to Freedom and from the Allistair Spark book on Mandela’s release and election. The picture and artifacts were all very well done and detailed. I enjoyed those the most, especially Mandela’s speeches.

Three of the specific parts of the museum were very powerful. The first was the Soweto student uprising, in which there were first person accounts of the brutality and video tape. Watching children being chased by police, especially police dogs was very hard. Many of them were shot fleeing, shot in the back. Then around the corner from this is a full sized armored land rover, the kind they used to chase the children in. Policemen would just have to look out of a narrow slit of light and shoot, protected in their armor they gunned down 600 children. The first child shot at Soweto was Hector Pieterson. You’ve probably seen the famous picture of him being carried by a high school boy with his crying sister beside him.

Mendy, our guide later this afternoon, was there. She was in primary school and took part in the march. She told us that the older students came and got the primary students to march, but the little ones didn’t know what they were marching for. When the older students saw the police, they put the younger ones in front, believing that the police wouldn’t shoot at the younger students. They were wrong. Mendy was shot in the back of her thigh, trying to get away.
Another part of the museum that I will always remember was actually like relieving my teen years and watching the news. It was a 20 minute video about the violent resistance by teens and young people during the 80’s. They faced down guns and humvees with Molotov cocktails and stones. Again watching the police brutality, throwing young men down from trucks and attacking women and children, it was like seeing the news in the 80’s about South Africa.

A third part of the museum I found very memorable was a section of excerpts from House of Bondage by Ernest Cale. The photographs were a powerful condemnation of apartheid and the era leading to apartheid. One picture showed the mine workers (diamond and gold mines) who had to arrive and leave the mines completely naked so they didn’t “steal” anything. Another discussed the relationship that black domestic workers had with their white employers, not the “mammy” like relationship you see depicted in some movies and fiction books about the apartheid era. Perhaps the most memorable was a picture of a malnourished baby, starvation was inherent in the townships and infant mortality rates there are still high.

After the museum, Mendy took us around Soweto (Southwest Township) to various spots that played key roles in the Soweto student revolt. Currently the Soweto township houses 4.5 million people and maybe as many as 6 million. Mendy said there is a 20% unemployment rate in Soweto, which is a lot less than I would have expected in a country with 60% unemployment. I was surprised about how well maintained Soweto was in comparison to some of the townships in Cape Town.

In Soweto, we went to the Hector Pieterson museum, the first child killed in the Soweto revolt. Following the student protests, the government cracked down on the youth, allowing no more than 5 to gather in a place at a time, and so there was a perpetual cycle of violence against the youth, especially at memorial services, and Mendy showed us a church that was constantly a target for police raids, which has gun shot scars. The picture is of the bricks used in the student memorial. Each brick has the name of a student killed in Soweto.

At the end of our tour, Mendy took us to Kiptown, the informal settlement in Soweto, where 150 people have to share 5 porta potties for bathrooms. There is no electricity, everything runs on batteries, and a lucky few have generators that can be run a few hours a day. Their fires are coals burning in the street, shared by 10 families. We took them oil, rice, bread, eggs, and gave the children penny candy. One woman said, “Thank you for giving me a plate of food for tonight.”

It’s difficult to capture what it is like in the informal settlements, and I didn’t take pictures because I don’t want the people who live there feel like they’re on display. It seems perverted to exploit their lifestyle. They are proud people, even in squaller.

When I first walked into the informal settlement, the first thing I noticed was the garbage. Wrappers of every kind and color, along with a variety of green, red, brown, and yellow cans and bottles, which line the muddy unpaved alley ways, not wide enough to really be considered roads. Narrow paths, crooked and serpentine wind between walls of corregated metal, precariously balanced on wooden planks, not even 2x4s. Small children dodge down the paths rapidly making rights and lefts running toward the “big white bus bringing us sweets.” Laundry drapes over dilapidated fencing and wires that stretch between the leaning shacks. There are craters in th paths from the water that flows from the central tap, water the township inhabitants carry to their homes in buckets to wash their clothes and bodies. It seems something from the Middle Ages, the way I envision the era with sewer running down main roads, no refrigeration and plenty of rodents. One night in one of those homes would change your life forever. What good did bringing them one meal today do?

Adults look at me with either veiled curiosity or contempt, a white American using their lives as a tourist attraction. Some open their doors and invite me, willing to and wanting to share with me their culture and their lives. One family we saw today had purple linoleum right on top of the dirt floor and one person in our group remarked about how clean it was, they were, as if poverty means you can’t be clean. I know what she meant, but at the same time I hoped that the woman of the house didn’t over hear the surprise in her voice. However, what surprised me the most is the idiosyncratic DVD player. In a two room shack that doesn’t have electricity, they had a TV and a DVD player. On the doors of the shacks are bar codes. I asked our guide about them. He said five years ago the government came and put the stickers on the doors, it was a step in getting them a government house. Our guide was a 25 year old entrepreneur who sells meat to make a living. He has lived in the township all his life.