THE heat is on in Soweto with the opening of the township's first heated swimming pool. Pimville Swimming Pool was officially opened on Saturday, 50 years after anti-apartheid priest Trevor Huddleston raised the money to build the township's first pool at Orlando West.
At the opening, Johannesburg's executive mayor, councillor Amos Masondo, said: "I am glad to take this opportunity to encourage aspirant black swimmers to follow in the tracks of Penny Heyns and do South Africa proud as she did."
Pimville Swimming Pool is the first indoor heated pool in a Gauteng township and is to be the focus of the province's Learn to Swim programme, organised by Swimming South Africa and sponsored by Telkom.
"The object of the programme is to teach every South African to swim. It is geared at previously disadvantaged communities," said Swimming South Africa's media liaison officer, Willem Theron. In the two years the programme has been running, 1 000 swimming instructors have been trained countrywide.
"There are 1000 drownings a year in the country, and the programme aims to reduce that number," said Theron. According to the Swimming South Africa website (http://www.learntoswim.co.za), more than 70% of South Africans have little or no swimming ability, and about 84% of drownings involve people from historically disadvantaged communities.
Saturday's opening ceremony featured a synchronised swimming display by the Old Edwardians Synchronised Swimming Club, a recital by the African Youth Ensemble, made up of children aged between eight and 19, and live music by African Devoted Artists, a dance, drum and marimba group.
Meanwhile, the 50-year-old Orlando Swimming Pool recently had a paint makeover in preparation for the summer deluge of swimmers.
Huddleston wrote about his idea of building a swimming pool in Soweto in his autobiography, Naught for Your Comfort. "Christmas was hotter than usual in 1951. It was a good psychological moment. I wrote a letter to the Rand Daily Mail, linking delinquency with the lack of recreational facilities …"
It took him three years to raise the approximately 25 000 pounds needed to build the Olympic sized pool, some of which was raised from "the European public". Huddleston describes the response to his appeal: "I have learnt from long experience that nothing is less predictable than the Johannesburg public conscience … But from the start the swimming bath appeal rang the right bell. Money poured in from all sides in the first two or three months."
The pool was finally built with the help of three Johannesburg businessmen, and Huddleston's description of the opening ceremony could just as easily describe Saturday's event in Pimville: "And when the speeches were all over, there was a rush and a scramble. Five or six hundred children, not waiting to strip, were in the water, splashing and shouting … It was a good moment."
