Day 10 - 12: Johannesburg & Soweto Tour

On Day 11, we explored Johannesburg. The densely populated city is the country's financial and commercial heartland. The city has many names that mean "place of gold". The city grew from a primitive mining camp to a metropolis in little over a century.

This is a former residence of Nelson Mandela in an upscale suburb of Johannesburg. He lived here after leaving office. He was the country's first democratically elected president after apartheid was abolished and he was released from prison. Today, it's a private residence for his grandkids so it's not open to the public.

The residents in this mostly white affluent neighborhood fled the rising crime and growing danger in the city to suburbs like this one. They erected gates, walls, and security systems to ensure their safety. Shawn remarked that they essentially imprisoned themselves. He has a point. You could argue that they unwittingly created self-made prisons.

Visitors have created these makeshift memorials to Mandela outside the home. 

The next stop was the Mandela House Family museum. The small museum preserves the modest house where Nelson Mandela lived from 1948 until he was imprisoned in 1963. It was restored in 2009 and now functions as a museum dedicated to the Mandela family.

 The home has some original furnishings along with bullet hole pock marks on the exterior from assassination and intimidation attempts.

Mandela with his daughters and grandaughters.

Soweto is the oldest, largest and best-known of the "townships" in Guateng. A cluster of settlements was formally incorporated as Soweto in 1963. The settlements included a group of 20,000 squatters that took root in the 1940s and another settlement created to accommodate people evicted from Sophiatown in 1959. Several pivotal events associated with the anti-apartheid struggle took place in Soweto, most notably the drawing up of the Freedom Charter in 1955 and the student uprising of 1976. It has also been home to some of the country's most revered figures, including Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who once lived a few houses apart.

In the townships, there's no class distinction based on neighborhood. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, drug dealers, shopkeepers, etc. all live next door to one another. The population breaks down to 25% rich, 70% middle class, and 5% poor.

The Soweto township is home to 3.5 million people. Electricity didn't come to Soweto until 1982. The township has emerged as a "city" within a city (Johannesburg).

 On July 16, 1976, 13 year-old Hector Pieterson became the first victim of police action in the Soweto Uprising, a landmark wave of anti-apartheid clashes triggered by student protests against the proposed introduction of Afrikaans in local schools. More than 20,000 people took part in the protests, and a subsequent commission attributed to 451 student deaths and 2,389 injuries to the police. The poignant Hector Pieterson Memorial, erected in the early 1990s two blocks from where it namesake was shot by police, is dominated by Sam Nzima's iconic photograph of the dying Pieterson being carried by another student, accompanied by his elder sister Antoinette.

The structure of the Memorial is symbolic. The large stone granite walls represent the police blockade. The gaps in the wall represent the missing children and their stories.

 This boulder represents the point of no return.

The water represents the mother's tears washing away the bloodshed of the murdered children. The stones represent the weapons used by the student protesters against the police. The stones are fused together to represent student unity.

 The Apartheid Museum documents the darkest days of South Africa's turbulent past.

 This is the entry into the museum. Visitor tickets randomly assign white or non-white status to mimic the segregation of Apartheid.

 A panel such as this one would determine a person's white or non-white classification based on appearance and attributes such as hair texture and complexion. The museum displays recall the National Party's apartheid policy, which came into force in 1948 and turned 20 million non-whites into legally defined second-class citizens.

 ID with official white/non-white classification. South Africans were required to carry this ID during apartheid. Cameras weren't allowed inside the museum, but there were some powerful exhibits. Specifically, one exhibit with 131 nooses representing the nuber of political prisoners hanged during apartheid. Another shows BBC footage taken in 1961 of Nelson Mandela when he was in hiding from the authorities and a series of evocative photographs taken by Renest Cole before he was sent into exile during the late 1960s.

 I thought these were some beautiful mosques that could be seen from the highway.

 We noticed these encampments along the highway. The homeless have created makeshift settlements under bridges and along the highway in Johannesburg.

Farewell dinner with our tour mates and our tour guide, Shawn.