December 27, 2001
By Lucille Davie
SOWETO is a city of contrasts: luxurious mansions across the road from tin shanties, green fields and streams around the corner from piles of garbage, BMWs with a single passenger parked at traffic lights alongside battered mini taxies jam-packed with passengers, and a friendliness and cheerfulness that disguises a high unemployment rate.
Jimmy's Face-to-Face Tours will take you on a tour of this pulsating township. Themba Qayiso was our guide, a personable man, who picked us up from Johannesburg's suburbs in a VW Combi van.
Qayiso starts the tour by saying: "Soweto has some 3,5 million people." Probably a more accurate figure is less than a million, but nobody knows for sure.
Soweto, an acronym for South Western Township, was begun in 1904 and from the 1950s, became the government's dumping ground for unwanted black settlements in white suburbs. Its first houses were made of tin and wood, the township only getting brick houses in 1933, built by Edwin Orlando, who gave his name to the first suburb of Orlando.
Soweto is huge, stretching across a vast area 20 kilometres south west of the city. Its people speak nine of the country's 11 languages. The tour covers only the eastern suburbs of the township, namely Diepkloof, Orlando, Dube and Pimville.
"The township is growing day by day, so although the government is building houses, it will probably never be able to keep up with the demand, as squatters take over houses vacated by those who get new houses," says Qayiso.
The tour enters Soweto on the Old Potchefstroom Road and very soon the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital comes into view on the left.
Baragwanath Hospital takes its name from a Welshman, John Albert Baragwanath ("bara" means bread, "gwanath" means wheat), who started a refreshment post and hostel for wagon drivers travelling to Kimberley, soon after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand. He called it the Wayside Inn, but it became known as Baragwanath's Place.
During World War II the British government asked the South African government if two hospitals for Imperial troops could be built. In 1942 the Imperial Military Hospital, Baragwanath was opened by Field Marshall Jan Smuts near the spot of the Wayside Inn, with 1 544 beds.
In 1997 "Chris Hani" was added to the name of the hospital, after the 1993 assassination of Communist Party and Umkhonto we Sizwe (the armed wing of the ANC) leader Chris Hani.
Qayiso says that today the hospital has 4 300 beds and is the biggest training hospital in the country. 2 500 nurses are trained there every year, helping 530 doctors. "Nurses and doctors coming out of Chris Hani Baragwanath are spread across the world, highly qualified and eagerly accepted anywhere," says Qayiso.
The tour stops at the Hospital and we walk past a large taxi rank and open-air market, and onto a pedestrian bridge to get a view of the township. "In Soweto you'll find lower-class homes, middle-class homes and upper-class homes," he says.
Qayiso points to traffic lights below us: when the light turns amber, "HIV" is visible on the glass, and "AIDS" shines up on the red light. "There are two sets of lights like this in Soweto."
Coming back down the bridge, Qayiso stops at a "pharmacy", a table stacked with roots, murky bottles, and bundles of twigs that resemble birds' nests. "These scented bundles are called imphepho, and you burn them when you want to chase away spirits, or talk to your ancestors, or when you have a nightmare," he says. This traditional healer will describe your problem and offer solutions to it before you describe any symptoms, adds Qayiso.
Once back in the Combi, we drive down a middle class street of brick houses, concrete perimeter walls and pretty gardens. Some garages have been converted into outside flats, and one or two rooms may house large families.
Then the Combi moves into Mandela Village and you get an idea of how sharp the contrasts of Soweto are. This village consists of tin shanties, built on top of one another, with thin alleyways between them, often covered in pools of water, and chemical toilets at the end of each block, each catering for dozens of people. Communal taps cater for an equal number of people.
Qayiso points to Toby's Cellular World, Toby being one of 23 millionaires in Soweto, and the owner of two mansions in the township. These millionaires are lawyers, doctors or mafia bosses, and their mansions are scattered throughout the suburbs.
The Combi continues through a middle-class area, with women standing on the pavement playing "Chinese gambling" - waiting for customers to call their numbers.
We drive past a hair salon, public phones in metal containers, soccer stadiums, several churches, schools, the Alliance Francaise de Soweto, a disused bus terminus with its metal roofs removed for squatter housing, football fields, an orphanage and "elephant houses".
Yes, "elephant houses". They have concrete walls and roofs which cannot be extended as most houses in Soweto have been. Each house accommodates 2-3 families, but it is the red roofs that are responsible for the name: they are round like an elephant's back.
We move into Orlando West, and drive past Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's mansion, with security cameras at the gate and each corner of the high walls and bullet-proof windows. Outside the walls is her garden: a large well-tended rock garden being weeded by three gardeners.
Around the corner is Vilakazi Street, the street of two Nobel Peace Prize winners: Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Tutu's house has blue-grey walls and electric fencing with a white house peeping over the walls. It has a neat pavement garden with shrubs and trees. Up the hill is the Mandela home from the 1960s, now a museum run by Madikizela-Mandela. It's a matchbox house comprising four interleading rooms, containing memorabilia from the short time they had together before Mandela went into hiding, was arrested and eventually imprisoned for 27 years.
Mandela now lives several kilometres north of the city centre, in the suburb of Houghton.
The Combi carries on up the hill to Kumalo Street, driving past the Orlando West High School, from which students marched down the other side of the hill and met with an army of policemen, in 1976. Halfway down the hill Hector Pieterson was shot and fell, on 16 June, and the spot is now commemorated with a stark stone memorial to the 12-year-old boy. A museum devoted to the day is in the final stages of preparation, to be opened early in 2002.
Qayiso turns the Combi around and heads towards Dube Village. "This is called Bank City because there are three major banks in this suburb." We drive past Shoprite, owned by Richard Maponya, another Soweto millionaire, and the YWCA and a car wash. We're heading for Wandie's Place, one of Soweto's many shebeens or African pubs.
Wandie's has a pleasant atmosphere, with one long wall covered with business cards. A TV set is propped in a corner, budgies in cages tweet noisily as we walk past fish tanks. Tables are laid for lunch, and in the corner are large bubbling pots with African dishes. "You can get a meal here anytime of the day or night - they have everything," says Qayiso.
We sit outside at plastic tables and chairs, under large canvas umbrellas, with stacks of brown Castle beer cases keeping us company. Opposite the shebeen is a brick house with a healthy mealie field, and behind it a swampy field stretching across the valley.
Back in the Combi, we bounce along into Orlando East and to the famous Regina Mundi Catholic Church, built in 1962. This church played a significant role in the South Africa of the 60s, 70s and 80s, when political parties and gatherings were banned. The church became a meeting place of people fighting to overthrow the apartheid government.
It is a handsome building with brick walls, grey slate slanting roof, and tall spire. Inside it has an A-framed white ceiling with wooden beams and a welcoming spaciousness. Outside in the garden is a peace pole, a two-metre high cement pole with four messages on each edge, in four different languages: Nguni, English, Sotho and Chinese. The English message reads: May peace prevail on Earth. Qayiso says: "Afrikaans was deliberately left out, being the language of the former oppressors."
We zip through Pimville on our way out of Soweto, back to the Old Potchefstroom Road. We drive past the open green fields, the Football Academy, the Soweto College of Education, the defunct power station with its two huge chimneys, the township's university - Vista - and stop at the other HIV and AIDS traffic lights.
There are three main kinds of transport in the township: minibus taxis, buses and trains. Most people take taxis because they are fast and cheap and stop anywhere, although regard them as dangerous. And then there are the BMWs.
"BMW stands for three things: 'Be my wife', 'Black man's worry', or 'Don't break my window'," says Qayiso, smiling broadly.
