Today was the shortest day of the year for the southern hemisphere. It is winter here. While the cold does not meet Boston’s criteria, the cold can be a problem in a place without “real” heat. Simphiwe waited for us at our scheduled meeting time at nine in the morning. He was our guide for the day, for our tour of the South Western Townships. After passing a theme park, a casino, luxurious downtown buildings, we exited the highway and found ourselves in the Townships known as Soweto. This area was designed as a place to move black and coloured people out of Johannesburg during Apartheid. Soweto is a good distance outside of Jo’burg, but still close enough to allow the people to work in the city.
This area lacks lacked water, electricity, and heat. The government has provided the residents one room buildings with walls lined with newspaper for insulation and a corrugated metal roof. All cooking is done on a paraffin stove. For entertainment, the family listens a radio powered by a car battery. There are no bathrooms in the homes, so the 20,000 residents of the this section of Soweto use 250 chemical toilets around the community.
We then moved on to the Soweto parliament, the Regina Mundi Church. The church is known as the parliament, as it acted as a community meeting house for anti-Apartheid organizations. A police raid during a meeting with 5,000 community members resulted in numerous injuries and visible scars in the church. In recognition, the church now hosts one of the most famous depictions of a black Madonna.
After visiting the church, we went to one of Nelson Mandela’s former homes. He came to this home when he was released after thirty-eight years of incarceration for only eleven days due to safety concerns. Packed with impressive pictures, awards, and honorable degrees, Mandela’s four-room home made me feel tiny in relation to his achievements.
Post the Mandela house museum, we ate lunch at a small South African cuisine buffet and drove to the Apartheid museum. The museum was amazing as a one topic exhibit. The flow was smooth, the exhibits were in-depth, and the timing and delivery were on cue. We were a bit rushed at the end, as we scheduled only two hours for a three-hour visit.
n. the system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race in force in South Africa 1948 - 91.
Today was intense and fulfilling. It will take quite a while to actually process what we learned.
I was told today by the guide today at the Regina Mundi Church, There is no NO in South Africa because nothing is definite, there is always more to learn or more to grow.
3 Responses to “So We To?”
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June 22nd, 2006 at 5:00 pm
Can you help a group of us here to understand the difference between black and coloured people. We are not clear and would like to better understand this.
June 23rd, 2006 at 11:19 pm
Colored people are those who are not black, not white, but another race, typically mixed. During Apartheid, one could actually change the specification of which “color” they were, with the exception of whites becoming blacks and blacks becoming whites. We’ll explain more in a future post.
June 27th, 2006 at 2:53 am
During segregation in the U.S., the southern states, particularly, had separate restrooms and drinking fountains (among other things) that were for colored people. Colored meant non-white. A person with coal-black skin was considered colored. Now with the various racial mixes, we hear the term “people of color.” Where Apartheid was practiced, perhaps “colored” was not used to describe a person who was actually black.