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Debbie
Ward has spent more than 15 years
as a journalist, several as Features
Editor of Travel Trade Gazette.
She now works freelance.
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South
Africa: Unearth Its Spiritual Roots
Travel
Trade Gazzette
I've used Nelson Mandela's loo. It is a fact I have since enjoyed
dropping into conversation. Well wouldn't you?
The former president isn't in the habit of offering tourists
the use of his bathroom. The opportunity arose during a tour
of his old home in Soweto. This is where Mandela lived from
1946 until 1961; where his then wife Winnie remained during
his 27 years imprisonment and to where he returned on his release
in 1990.
The one storey house is small and cluttered with framed letters
of support and honorary doctorates from around the world. A
championship belt sent by boxer Sugar Ray Leonard sits on the
kitchen worktop and in the bedroom are the boots the former
president wore on Robben Island.
Mandela lived in Soweto for just 11 days after his release.
Outside his gates the volume of well-wishers - and of their
all night singing - became too much and he was forced to move.
More than a 100 people a day now visit the Soweto house but
the guide who showed my group around was casual: "You can photograph
anything, and please feel free to use the bathroom if you need
to," she said. Four of us immediately formed a queue and I can't
have been the only one driven more by curiosity than the call
of nature.
Mandela's house is on Vilakazie Street, the only road in the
world to have produced two Nobel Prize winners - Archbishop
Desmond Tutu's (still inhabited) house is a few doors down.
This is the must-see on the itineraries of the handful of tours
you can now take round Soweto. But to limit sightseeing to this
one street would be to miss the real flavour of these infamous
suburbs.
I took a guided tour run by Joe Motsogi, a Soweto resident and
founder of JMT Tours & Safaris.
Soweto is a huge place. The collection of townships, which was
created in the 1930s to ghettoise the non-white residents of
Johannesburg, has 3.5 million inhabitants -700,000 more than
the city itself. It boasts 415 kindergartens and, with 3,200
beds, the world's largest hospital.
Soweto houses weren't fully electrified until 1985 and there
are informal settlements where thousands of people still live
in conditions that are truly basic.
In one such squatter camp, where unemployment runs at 60 per
cent, I met a single mother of four who lives in a tiny home
fashioned from corrugated iron. She shares an outside toilet
with 30 people and cooks by candlelight over a paraffin stove.
What struck me most about her tin shack was the air of permanence
created by her homey touches - a table cloth, a flowery bed
cover, a calendar, kitchen cabinets and wall clock. She had
been there for ten years.
When I asked what single thing would make most difference to
her life she laughed and said "electricity" with the kind of
expression that I might use to suggest I could win the lottery.
But my guide was anxious for me to put Soweto in perspective.
We visited a smart brick home belonging to an elderly couple
that could have been a retirement bungalow in Eastbourne. In
the same area, doctors and lawyers, now free to move, still
choose to stay.
I noticed that although the Soweto roads had names, few had
signs. Joe explained that years ago teenagers, including himself,
had removed them to make it difficult for the police to find
and arrest them for real or alleged Apartheid resistance.
To learn more of South Africa's dark political history I visited
the Apartheid Museum. My entry ticket informed me that I was
black for the day, which meant I had to enter through the turnstile
labelled 'Non-whites'.
The museum is disappointingly short on real-life testimonies
but does a good job of charting the rise and fall of South Africa's
racist politics. I watched a TV interview with a young fugitive
Mandela and another in which the architect of Apartied, former
prime minister Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, infamously defended racial
segregation as "good neighbourliness".
There is plenty to make you cringe but UK visitors may be uplifted
by a display of familiar boycott posters and the realisation
that something as small as their choice of apples might have
helped make a difference.
I had lunch in a former Shebeen - the name given to illegal
bars at a time when black people were forbidden to drink alcohol.
Again my perceptions were challenged. This was no seedy speakeasy
but a smart little restaurant with waiters and a well stocked
buffet of traditional foods. It was here among jubilant Sowetans
that I learnt that former sporting pariah South Africa would
host the 2010 football World Cup.
"This will strengthen
our relationship with other parts of the world," enthused Joe
as our fellow lunchers spilled out to dance in the street. Soweto
more than most places needs such understanding. Many tourists,
mindful of newspaper reports of past violence, would recoil
at the idea of a visit. The reality is of suburban South Africans,
buoyed by a decade of democracy, going about their daily business.
My only uneasiness during my sightseeing tour was at the thought
I might be treating the locals like animals in a zoo. Joe reassured
me that most Sowetans are happy to see tourists - some scratch
a living selling souvenirs on the roadside, others are just
glad for the outside world to witness how they live - both the
poverty and the normality.
Would I go back? Certainly, only next time I would book into
one of the township's emerging tourist bed and breakfasts.
I agree with Joe: if you haven't been to Soweto, you haven't
been to South Africa. And you certainly won't have used Nelson
Mandela's lurid green bathroom.
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