Soweto (Johannesburg)

Member Name: tim_russell

Product:	Johannesburg
Date:	22/06/01 (101 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Friendly, vibrant, welcoming

Disadvantages: Very poor, need to go with a guide

I regularly travel to Johannesburg on business, and like most other reviewers find it to be a grim, paranoid, dangerous place, with its downtrodden, ghettoised black population and its fearful, mostly racist, boorish white population.

The more affluent suburbs to the north where I spend most of my time, for example Sandton and Randburg, are soulless places, a mixture of electric-fenced white homes and bland shopping malls. Nothing here to entertain the tourist or the bored business traveller.

So on my last visit I ignored the ill-informed advice of white work colleagues and took a half-day tour to Soweto with a company called Imbizu Tours. Soweto, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is a township housing over 4 million people, originally established during the apartheid era as a home for immigrant black goldmine workers. It is the spiritual heart of the struggle against apartheid, and birthplace of leading black South African figures such as Nelson & Winnie Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Mbango Butheleze and Steve Biko. These days it is home to the majority of Johannesburg's black population and, since the collapse of apartheid, steadily opening itself up to tourism.

With my excellent Soweto-born guide Nelson ("Were you named after Mandela?" "NO - he was named after ME!") at the wheel, we left the corporate hellhole of Sandton and headed to the south-west of Johannesburg (which is how Soweto got its name - SOuth WEst TOwnship). We eventually pulled up in a street of strikingly-designed, clearly expensive houses. "Welcome to Soweto!" said Nelson - yes, we were in Soweto's stockbroker belt. Don't assume it's all tin shacks, for plenty of South Africa's black elite still live here too.

My visit was one of extremes, beginning with a visit to one of the squatter camps, an illegal settlement of shacks made from polythene and corrugated iron. It felt like a cliche, being followed
by a dozen or so delighted African children, and it also felt voyeuristic, until I realised that tourism is one way for these desperately poor people to earn a living and to expose their plight to the rest of the world. The camp even had a bar, or "shebeen", where we drank warm, lumpy homebrew with some of the locals.

Other highlights included the church where white police fired indiscriminately on black students back in the late 70s (sorry, can't remember the exact date) - the bulletholes are still there - the clothes market, otherwise known as "Bend-down Harrods" as all the clothes are on the ground, and the 8-hole golf course. Yes, Soweto has a golf course, and my guide Nelson had recently written to Tiger Woods asking for money to build a 9th hole!

Despite fearful warnings from whites before my visit, I found Soweto far more vibrant, lively and welcoming than any other area of Johannesburg. The locals were friendly and curious rather than threatening - at one point I went alone into a supermarket and was instantly surrounded by smiling, handshaking Sowetans - and seemed delighted that someone from Europe was visiting their city.

So by Western standards, Soweto is shockingly, upsettingly poor and deprived, but if you're going to Johannesburg and want to meet friendly people and really feel like you're in Africa, then you simply have to go there.

Summary: