South Africa 2024 Trip Day 1, Part 3: A Visit to Soweto & the Enduring Legacy of South Africa's Remaining Contradictions (September 26)

   

This was a picture (which I have since cropped) of the new South Africa flag of the post-apartheid era. I actually took this one at the apartheid museum, as this was the final display, if you will, of the museum, the symbol of the emergence of a "new South Africa."

So here is Part 3 of my first day in South Africa.

Yes, it was a busy day. On top of landing in Jo'burg early in the morning and getting my first impressions of South Africa, I had booked a guide to visit Johannesburg, the Apartheid Museum, Soweto, and Pretoria. 

This particular blog entry will focus on the visit to Soweto. It included the Soweto Towers, as well as a section of tin shacks where people still are living in dire poverty (the guide wanted to show his visitors how some of the people living in Soweto still really live), which lacked basic amenities. There was a community tap for running water, and the residents had to illegally wire electricity into their homes just for minimal lighting and other use. The shacks all had identifying numbers and, as you can see based on the photographs I took here, it is a grim life. They are trying to fix it up and the government is working on building permanent new homes with bathrooms and running water and electricity and all of the other amenities of modern life, but it is a painstakingly slow process. 

After that, we visited the section of Soweto where, on one street, two Nobel Peace Prize winners lived. Those were, of course, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former South African President Nelson Mandela. 

Finally, we went through other parts of Soweto on our way out, and passed right by Orlando Stadium, which used to play a prominent role during the struggle against apartheid as a gathering place. 

Here is what I wrote either during the trip, or shortly thereafter (but which I do not believe was ever published):

A part of me instinctively knew that a real trip to South Africa would not just be fun and beauty. This country always feels like it also has this sad side to it.

And you really don't have to dig that deep. It's all right here in plain sight. The impoverished parts of town, or individual communities are known more as townships here, rather than the ghetto or the hood or inner city, as they often are referred to in the United States. And they were right there to be seen pretty much everywhere that we went. Soweto is the largest one in the country, and it is very close to (indeed, I believe officially a part of) Johannesburg. But I saw some on the way to and from Pretoria. And there were certainly some in evidence in and around Cape Town, as well as on the outskirts of town.

Really, all you have to do is open your eyes. 

That is why South Africa has always seemed to me a perfect mixture of both the beautiful and the tragic. In fact, the astonishing absurdity of seeing poor townships which feel like they should be eyesores, yet which very often were right in plain view of wealthy communities, perhaps has always felt morbidly fascinating, and part of the appeal of South Africa. I admittedly never understood it. In fact, even after visiting the country, I still don't.

Frankly, part of the lure of this place was the paradox of this country having such an abundance of both of these elements. 

Never have I felt so much an outsider or intruder. While I had heard about Soweto for as long as I had studied South Africa, and of course wanted to see it, it felt somehow different actually being there. Never have I felt so much an outsider or intruder, with an element of voyeurism to it. I was glad to finally see it in person, and it felt important in some sense to be there and see that, yes, real people with real lives live here, and many of them are still stuck in poverty. And my presence there felt out of place. It brought to mind those lyrics by Neil Young in his iconic "Keep on Rockin' in the Free World:"

Don't feel like Satan

But I am to them

So I tried to forget it anyway I can.

Yet, this also is still the reality in South Africa. It traditionally was a strictly racially segregated nation, and this was enforced by laws. The poverty of the Africans was by design. They were viewed either as inferior servants of the whites (both the Afrikaners and English traditionally viewed them this way) or as inconvenient nuisances, or both. But they were very rarely regarded as anything remotely like equals, like human beings, and then only by a few of the whites, who stood out all the more as a result of this clearly different perspective.

I thought that on some level, I understood the term "white privilege" the way that it is understood in the United States, which is another country which historically had very turbulent racial tensions, and which also had strict segregation and racist laws. It was called something different there, as it was known as Jim Crow segregation. There were similarities to apartheid, although certainly, it was not quite as intense as apartheid in South Africa tended to be, where nightly raids on impoverished communities was a daily occurrence, and where there was absolutely no equality recognized anywhere in the laws, which is one of the distinctions that I remember Nelson Mandela making in his autobiography. Also, the white minority apartheid government in South Africa tried to legally bar citizenship and it's privileges to blacks in particular by establishing "homelands," which also were sometimes referred to as "bantustans," which then would be encouraged to declare independence. Then, the government assigned blacks to these homelands, which had nothing much to do with actual historical or cultural homelands, but rather, was a classic divide and conquer strategy. They subsequently encouraged these homelands to gain their independence, and four of them (Transkei, Ciskei, Venda, and Bophuthatswana) officially did. No other country recognized them as independent countries, and no anti-apartheid activists recognized them, either.

There were also some other differences between official segregation as it existed in the United States versus what it was in South Africa, although they would require far more study and scrutiny to get into. Right now, I just wanted to write a little about this, and to keep painting the picture of my impressions on the country with broad brushstrokes. 

Since the end and abolition of apartheid, the African Nation Congress (ANC), which was the largest and most prominent anti-apartheid organization during the days of white minority rule in South Africa, has been in charge. They have had control of the government ever since, although it's control has been seriously slipping, and is now in danger of eroding altogether. This is largely due to high profile cases of corruption, as well as the slow progress towards trying to build greater equity for disadvantaged people in the country. As much as the ANC government works to try and eliminate the necessity of such ghettos - and to be sure, there has been real and measurable progress - it nevertheless has been and remains an excruciatingly slow process.

Progress remains slow. 

My guide explained how progress is being made. The government has been trying to build new housing. He showed me an example of it, and it is pretty close to the shantytown which I visited. In fact, it is within view of it in some of the pictures which I took (see above). This is government subsidized housing with pretty much all of the amenities which you would expect in modern homes, such as electricity, running water, heat during winter. But the waiting list for these kinds of homes is painfully slow. Everyone living in the community which I specifically visited was on a waiting list for precisely these kinds of new homes. 

Yes, the progress is there. But that progress is excruciatingly slow. The waiting list remains extensive, and there really is no clear timetable of when the people in the remaining shanty towns will actually get housing. My guide of this particularly shanty town (which, if I remember, did not even have a name) have been waiting for many years, as it was created in 2009. Originally, it was supposed to be temporary. But some of the residents, at least, have lived there now for a decade and a half.

I remember one saying 

Mi

This was an example of one picture which captured the "old" with the "new" of Soweto. Clearly, the shantytowns, as they are called, still exist. However, you can see the new housing in the background, with the "Towers" of Soweto just behind these.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu's House

The Mandela House

Final Place:

I took this picture because I wanted to capture something that seemed to reflect the difficulties, as well as the hard work (it was not mere laziness, as too many whites tended to portray it as), of many of the people living in the townships. It might not be obvious, because I pulled out my cell camera too late. But that thing in between the two trucks in this picture is a recycling trolley, if you will. It is being pulled by someone (in each case that I observed, it was always a man) who was pulling this massive thing by hand, and on the streets, while passing cars and trucks hardly seemed to give much room while themselves passing by. There were everywhere in and around both Johannesburg and Pretoria. My tour guide of those places assured me that they also existed in Cape Town, although I admittedly did not see any during my stay there.