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 To Soweto and Back

By Howard Wayne    (c) 2006
jewishsightseeing.com, July 29, 2006

SOWETO, South Africa—Early in our visit to South Africa Mary and I had the opportunity to visit Soweto, the black township southwest of Johannesburg[1] that became world famous during the struggle against apartheid, and then to visit the museum that documents that struggle.  Recently we were back near Johannesburg and I used the opportunity to revisit Soweto, to spend more time in the museum than the hour I had previously been allowed, and to see a little of central Johannesburg.

Johannesburg – known as  Jo’burg to many locals, Jozi to the more hip ones, and Egoli – city of gold in an African language - is literally the product of the reef of gold on which it sits.  Before the discovery there was only a collection of farms there; afterwards a boom city that forms the heart of the industrial center of South Africa and is now the second largest city in sub-Saharan Africa.[2]  Interspaced throughout the city are high mounds of “mine dumps;” yellow earth brought up from the mines that were harvested for gold and stand discarded.

Most of the gold ore was a mile or more underground, which made it expensive to dig.  Since the price of gold was fixed at the time, the only way to make mining profitable was to keep the price of labor down.  That meant, primarily, using cheap African labor.  Working age blacks were induced to migrate to cities by the government’s imposition of a “hut tax” or other taxes payable in cash, which was in short supply to rural, tribal areas.  Cash was available in that city of gold – Egoli – Jo’burg, and blacks moved there to work in the mines.

These economic realities collided with the policies of successive governments, first of Jim Crow-like segregation and then of apartheid.  The result was the creation of black townships at the edge of cities.  Soweto, with an estimated population of 2.4 million, is the largest of these townships.

The main portion of Soweto is not what you might imagine.  It is primarily composed of small, matchbook houses made of brick and wood.  However the increased migration from the rural areas, no longer restrained by the influx control laws of apartheid, has increased the neighborhoods of shacks made of corrugated metal.  We drove on a dirt road between two lines of these shanties; no water connection except for what was available from a common spigot for a group of houses, no electrical connection, and men drinking alcohol at ten in the morning in the front yards.  The children were not smiling or waving at us – a bad sign.

Soweto is where Nelson Mandela lived with his first two wives, Evelyn and Winnie.  Winnie still lives there in a large house surrounded by security.  We pulled over only a short distance from her house.  Across the street more than 100 cattle were being driven along the road to pasturage.  Each was worth about $600, so the owner was quite wealthy.  Eleven head of cattle is the standard “labola,” or bride price.

What was Mandela’s house is now a museum; in fact a shrine to him.  The real advantage to visiting it is to see the interior of a typical house in Soweto although running water and electricity have been added since he lived there.[3]  The house and the rooms are tiny.  Three or four children would sleep in a side room off from the dining area.  Displayed on one wall of that room is a letter signed by a number of Michigan legislators in 1990 asking then-President Bush to apologize for the CIA’s purported role in Mandela’s apprehension by police in 1962 which led to his imprisonment for more than 27 years.  In his autobiography Mandela, rejected the claim of CIA responsibility for his capture, stating this “story has never been confirmed and I have never seen any reliable evidence to the truth of it . . . . I cannot lay my capture at [the CIA’s] door.” (“Long Walk to Freedom,” p. 320.)  One wonders what impression this letter gives to the many visitors to the museum.

Not far from Mandela’s home is where the 13-year old Hector Pieterson was shot to death on June 16, 1976 and the Soweto uprising began.  In front of the nearby Hector Pieterson museum is the iconic photograph of Pieterson’s body being carried by a 16-year old youth while Pieterson’s sister screams in despair over his killing.  The museum, with displays and videos, documents the events leading up to the uprising, the shootings, and what followed.  June 16 is celebrated as a national holiday, Youth Day, and its thirtieth anniversary was last month.

The spark for the uprising was the government’s requirement that students be instructed in the Afrikaans language, which they considered to be the “language of the oppressor.”  More than twenty years earlier the “Bantu Education Act” was enacted to reduce academic opportunities for blacks so they would be equipped for no more than semi-skilled jobs.  Through 1976 per capita education expenditures for African children substantially declined. 

With the Afrikaans mandate the students went on strike and marched along the streets of Soweto.  They were met by armed police who fired live ammunition into the crowd.  The students fled, but a riot developed with the burning of government buildings.  Whites unfortunate to be found in Soweto that day were murdered.  Riot police came in force.  The uprising spread throughout the country and continued for a year.  Television, which had just been introduced in South Africa in 1976, brought the riots to the homes in the white enclaves.  The anti-apartheid movement, which was in quietude because its leaders were either in prison or in exile, again came to the attention of the world.

On the south side of Johannesburg is the Apartheid Museum which is built in a former mining area and is adjacent to “Gold Reef City,” a Disneyesque presentation of the city’s mining era.  The exterior of the museum resembles a prison.  One pays the admission price and is given a ticket designated either for whites or non-whites; the ticket determines through which door one enters the museum and is meant to immediately confront the visitor with the feeling of apartheid.  Along the walls of the entry area are copies of passes that non-whites were required to carry at all times.  It set out their racial classification which was the key to their rights, or lack of rights, in the apartheid state.

  The museum does a good job in demonstrating the daily humiliation of petty apartheid, but is less effective in presenting the big picture.  Despite a superficial similarity to the separate bathrooms and separate educational systems of the American South before the Civil Rights movement, apartheid was not about “separate but equal,” but about “separate-ness” of the races imposed by the government.  The fallacy of apartheid was that separate-ness was impossible because whites and blacks were inextricably linked through the economy, geography, history and blood.  The presence of a multitude of mixed race “Coloureds,” gave a lie to the central concept of apartheid.[4] The reality of apartheid was the effort of the state to monopolize the land and the privileges of the country for the whites and primarily for the Afrikaners.  This meant stripping blacks of South African citizenship, consigning them to marginal areas of the region (the so-called “homelands”), and allowing them to work and live in the cities only at the sufferance of the government.

There is a theater close to the entrance of the museum which shows a twelve minute film on the development of South Africa from pre-European times to 1948, when the National (Afrikaner) Party took over and began to implement apartheid.  Although displays show events prior to 1948, that is the pivotal year.  Further in the museum are the titles of discriminatory laws enacted to implement apartheid, videos of National Party leaders, and the history of the resistance.  Initially it was passive resistance, but peaceful demonstrations were met by violence.  In 1960 police shot and killed 69 Africans who were demonstrating in Sharpeville against the Pass law.  The following year the ANC moved to armed resistance.

Space, and my desire to have you keep reading my missives, does not allow me to discuss everything I saw in my total of four-and-a-half hours in the museum.  A display close to the exit the museum presents the feel good story of the liberation movement ending in triumph and reconciliation, with President Mandela being warmly received by a predominantly Afrikaner crowd when he appeared in a rugby jersey at the World Cup of Rugby that was won by South Africa in 1995.  How the story will play out is still being determined.

Visitors ask me whether racism persists in South Africa.  As to whites, I can say there have been three responses: emigration, resignation, and pragmatism.  A million whites left the country at the end of apartheid.  It was simpler for the English-speaking whites to find a home elsewhere; for Afrikaners there was no other place into which they could easily fit.  Other whites have withdrawn from involvement in civic affairs, acknowledging they will be a permanent minority and occasionally making derogatory comments about blacks either in private or after checking out the room.  The pragmatists know that South Africa is an economically dynamic nation, by far the most developed on the continent, in which they can only play a part by joining with the majority.  Given the demographics, which drive political decisions in a democratic country, white racism would be a stupid and self-defeating strategy.

There are occasional incidents.  A few weeks ago a statue of a semi-mythical African chief was unveiled at a public site in Pretoria.  Not long afterwards it was defaced.  The abbreviation for a racial epitaph and the Nationalist flag were painted on the statue.

Politics is still racially polarized.  The dominant ANC receives only a smattering of support from white voters; the Democratic Alliance receives few votes from blacks (it does get substantial support from Coloureds).  With whites being only about 12.5% of the population, the black-white division is becoming far less important than the economic divide.  There are growing black upper and middle classes and a persistent black underclass.  The propinquity of affluence and poverty greatly increases the crime rate.  That is what I saw in Soweto, and dealing with the economic disparity is South Africa’s greatest challenge.