Soweto, this exotic sounding name, labels nothing else but the location and the former status of the very place: a township, southwest of Johannesburg. Initially these townships had one function: to keep the black population, to be more precise black men, away from towns where the white folks lived. The living conditions were appalling. The barracks offered no privacy (beds were separated by curtains), there was no electricity, no sanitary facilities, no transport, nothing. And the men were coming in great numbers to find work in the mines surrounding Johannesburg.
It was also in Soweto, on June 16th 1976, that the apartheid regime committed an act of terror so barbaric that the world starting looking. The police opened fire on schoolchildren protesting against the introduction of Afrikaans as the language of instruction. Two hundred people died in this massacre, many of them children. The first child shot was twelve-year-old Hector Pieterson. A photo of the fatally wounded boy carried away by another student and with Pieterson's crying sister running along made it world news.
Today, Vilakazi Street, where the shooting happened and the excellent Hector Pieterson Museum, have become stops for the increasing number of tourists that visit Soweto. Other sights are the houses of Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Susuli and Desmond Tuto. Most people know Nelson Mandela as an ANC leader, fighting against discrimination and oppression, but few people know that he opened the first black law office in the Johannesburg Business district, if he was not working as a security guy or boxing… Rather diverse for someone of royal descent!
Picture by Jason Risley.
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