Soweto....South West Townships..

We board the bus this morning after a full English breakfast in the lovely dining room on the fourth floor overlooking the croquet green and lap pool.  This is the land of the wee tea cup so we threw back our coffee like shots of tequila so that it would be hot.

Piloted by Peter, we are headed to Soweto down the M1 South past downtown where the diamond shaped glass high rise of Debeers Diamonds dominates the scene and crossing the ridge or reef where gold was first discovered.

The mines are now closed up and filled up with rainwater which leaches out the acids used in the gold extraction process and is threatening the wetlands.  No one takes responsibility for this environmental damage.  

We pass a handful of mosques.  Most of the Muslim population is concentrated in Cape Town but here in Joburg when the Saudis build a mosque, the Sufi Turks immediately build one and the cycle goes on and on.  You can imagine that there is no shortage with all this one-upmanship.

Johannesburg was named after Paul Johann Kruger by developers who wanted to curry favor with this leader who mistrusted foreigners; the name stuck.

The landscape of settlements was arranged in three areas with the whites occupying the prime areas and valleys.  Over a few hills would be the area for the Cape Coloreds, or mixed race peoples.  Then further separated by even more hills was the area for the blacks.

It takes us thirty-five minutes to drive on the freeway to Soweto illustrating just how far removed they were forced to live in the early days.  Today it is one metroplex.

When we exit the highway we see one of the military camps whose main job was supression of the blacks as we enter Soweto to pick up our specialty guide,  Bongani. His name means gratitude in Zulu, although this Soweto native is a member of the Tonga tribe.

He directs us past the second largest hospital in the world built in WWII.  With a staff of 650 doctors and 3,000 nurses it delivers 25,000 babies each year.  On the other side of the road are two old cooling towers now brilliantly painted with South African icons. Stretched between them is a bungee line...at least the hospital is across the street!!

Soweto contains forty suburbs and holds 4.5 million people.  We are headed to an informal settlement where we will tour the area with a resident, Lawrence.  Lawrence is very personable guy who can see from our nervous looks that we need reassurance that this visit is not an imposition on the people as we hardly want to be voyeurs. Here they live awaiting to be given government housing.  That wait may be twenty years or longer or their promised space may be sold off to someone with connections.

Our welcoming committee are four little boys with little boy mischief written all over them.  Any older siblings will have made the forty-five minute walk to compulsory school in their uniforms.  They are full of smiles, waves and fist bumps.

It is difficult to describe the houses cobbled together from corrugated tin, old billboards and tarpaulins, the roofs weighed down with heavy rocks.  They are one room.

We are invited in to one woman's tidy home dominated by a king sized bed where the whole family sleeps. Shiny cooking pots are neatly stacked on a shelf.

There is no running water or sewer, the pure water coming from community taps and neighborhood privies dotted throughout.  

There is no electricity, candles provide illumination and cooking is done over sterno. The few TV's are run off car batteries that are recharged at the filling station.  There is quite a line during half time of the rugby games.

Laundry is strung here and there that is sure to dry quickly in the brisk wind.  Most all are unemployed receiving subsidies for children up to age eighteen or if they are over sixty-five.  Some work making crafts.

Guide Tony suggests we not give money to the little ones but tip Lawrence.  Boy, a big bag of candy would have come in handy here!  Later, we notice him buying some treats for the kids.

We head now to Freedom Square anchored by the pillars of freedom and dedicated to the ten point charter the people wanted fullfilled before they could move to democracy.

It is a space of several football fields where the "X" is a theme repeated in the construction.  The "X" stands for the mark used to vote.  There is an X-shaped installation flanked with iron silhouettes of those queuing to vote.  The area is somewhat unkept and trash- filled.  Good sense suggests that this one place to skip the restrooms.

The interior of the Freedom Tower in which a giant circle inscribed with the ten demands for freedom rests under an open oculus with an "X" in the center.

Well, we have another stop at Hector Peterson Museum, or I should say outside of the museum.  Due to general neglect the roof has collapsed and it is unsafe to enter. Outside we meet Antoinette, big sister of Hector.

In 1976 the Bantu Education Act was established by the Apartheid Government in order to set a different curriculum for black pupils unequal to their white counterparts and to be taught in Afrikaans.  This would certainly disadvantage the blacks as Afrikaans is little spoken worldwide.  Students loosely organized behind their parents' backs and planned for a peaceful march to a nearby stadium in the Orlando suburb of Soweto but as they moved along many of the much younger students joined in.

Antoinette was very surprised to see little Hector, aged 12, within the group.  Clashes broke out between the students and police and shots rang out mortally wounding Hector.  This shocked the world with Hector Peterson becoming the poster child of the uprising that would indirectly and ultimately lead to South Africa's first free and fair elections in 1994.  This picture spurred the movement.  Antoinette is the girl in the picture running along her slain brother.

First glitch of the trip occurred when our lunch stop at a B&B in the area apparently forgot about us.  But no problem, Tony herded us back on the bus and called ahead to the hotel where we arrived to find the tables set.  So we ordered off the menu...not a bad thing.

How could we complain after what we have witnessed today!