Safari So Good: Soweto

Animal Count: 3 domestic cats, 1 toy dog

The lodge owner asked if we wanted a guide to take us to see Soweto Township, and despite having just arrived in Johannesburg after a 12 flight around and over the equator, we dumped our luggage and jumped in a car driving.

Johannesburg has many townships, but the largest and most famous (perhaps infamous) one in South Africa is Soweto. Its name is an acronym for South West Township, and it was created in 1904 to move nonwhites out of the city but keeping them close enough to work. It's huge, housing anywhere between 2.5 and 5 million people, some in abject squalor.

It rose in prominence one particular day in 1976, when a group of schoolchildren and their teachers walked in protest to cuts in education. The police overreacted and fired into the crowd, hitting many. One of the first shot and killed was a young boy, Hector Pieterson. He instantly became a symbol of the Soweto uprising, primiarly due to a photo of him being held and carried by a still unknown man who was unable to save his life despite pinching shut a bleeding wound in Hector's leg.

There is now a memorial at this site, and a museum too.

the line of grass is a bit sunburned at the mo'

Soweto is also famous for a more positive reason. It contains a small street that has been home to two Nobel Prize Winners, surely the rarest street on the planet. Those illustrious two of course are Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Winnie Mandela also lives in Soweto and we passed her rather large and luxurious abode in comparison to her earlier marital home.

one of many bullet holes holes from earlier police drive bys

I was never that keen to send much time in Jo'burg, but there is one museum that I really wanted to see, and we were taken there after our time in Soweto. The Aparthied Museum is indeed good, and there was a temporary exhibition on Nelson Mandela there as well. I happen to have been born on Nelson Mandela's 40th birthday (every time I had a big birthday, he had a bigger one!). He is at present in critical condition in the hospital, and I can't help but think the authorities are waiting until he passes his 95 birthday before letting him go. So there were lots of scaffolding platforms around his house all ready for the press, and a few flowers dotted around his door.