Walindah was very shy and I seemed to do most of the talking. ‘There’s, um, lots of people here in Soweto,’ I said as we weaved our way through the crowd.
‘Yes, but no one knows how many people live in Soweto,’ Walindah shrugged. ‘The government says one million, but it’s more like four million. People do not want to do a census because they don’t trust the government, so it is impossible to find out how many people there are.’
It was hard to hear Walindah. Not only was she softly spoken, but there was also loud, bass-heavy, tribal-type house music blaring out from shops and cars and market stalls. Walindah told me that the music is called kwaito, an Africanised version of hip-hop that started in Soweto and is now the most popular form of dance music on the continent.
Even every inch of space on the narrow footbridge that spanned the main road was taken up with market stalls. Well, when I say ‘stalls’, I mean people sitting behind cardboard boxes. This was obviously the place to sell illegal substances and shifty-looking folk were either selling blocks of hash, dried bunches of marijuana leaves, pills or—I wonder if they smoke ’em or sniff ’em—pairs of socks.
‘That is where I work,’ Walindah said, pointing across the road to a collection of large ugly buildings that looked like a rundown council estate. ‘It is Chris-Hani Baragwanath Hospital, the largest hospital in the world. There are over three thousand beds and seven thousand staff members.’ Walindah was one of two thousand nurses.
‘More than two thousand patients check in to the hospital every day,’ Walindah continued. ‘And over half of them are HIV-positive.’
Walindah then reeled off some stats that were just staggering. One in five people in South Africa, which has the most severe AIDS epidemic in the world, are infected with AIDS. That’s more than 6 million people. Around 260 000 of them are children under sixteen.
‘There are about one thousand AIDS deaths every day,’ Walindah said matter-of-factly. Although Walindah worked in the maternity ward, she still witnessed the effects of AIDS every single day—30 per cent of pregnant women in South Africa are living with HIV.
‘We only started to supply drugs to help people with AIDS two years ago,’ Walindah said. ‘And this is many years after most other countries have had them.’
As we walked past the hospital entrance we had to sidestep a line of folk waiting to enter. Although we all know that you can’t catch AIDS through casual contact, it was a bit unnerving just to think how likely it was that a lot of them had AIDS.
We walked in silence until we’d finally passed the last of the hospital buildings.
‘So, were you born in Soweto?’ I asked Walindah.
‘Yes, and so were my mum and dad.’
Walindah was proud of being a Sowetan and as we trudged, or at least I trudged, through the suburbs, Walindah filled me in on the history of the ‘township’. The city of Soweto (a contraction of South Western Townships) was established in 1930 when the government decided that the black suburbs in Johannesburg were getting too close to the white suburbs. The blacks were given eviction notices and were moved to a farm 18 kilometres from the city. It doesn’t sound as if they got a very good deal, though. It took the new residents of Soweto three hours to get to work because there were no roads—or shops, parks, electricity and running water. Over the next twenty years the population of Soweto exploded, with large numbers of Zulus and others driven to the city in search of work and a better way of life. The ‘better way of life’ turned out to be in overcrowded slums. Eventually the municipal authorities decided that if they built 20 000 low-cost houses then they would have better control of their low-cost workers.
‘There are only two roads in and out of Soweto,’ Walindah said. ‘The road was built this way to control the people. The police could just cut off the two roads and stop people moving in or out.’ The locals had their own way of outsmarting the police, though. Under Apartheid Soweto didn’t have street signs to make it hard for the police to know where they were.
We were now walking past the endless rows of low-cost houses and, although they were actually more like tiny brick matchboxes with a window and a door, it still wasn’t how I imagined Soweto. It was a far cry from a shantytown and many of the homes had lovingly tended gardens, fresh paint jobs and satellite dishes.
Walindah’s neighbourhood was much the same except with much larger homes and much larger satellite dishes.
Walindah’s mum Yolanda, a robust and jolly woman, greeted us at the door (I still had to pass the final inspection before I was allowed to enter the house). Yolanda was a high-school teacher and—making me feel very old indeed— was a year younger than me. Walindah gave me a brief tour of her home, which looked pretty much identical to any average suburban home, then showed me to my room. ‘No, no I can’t sleep here,’ I protested. Walindah was giving me her room and she was going to sleep with her mum.
‘No, no,’ she replied. ‘You are our special guest.’
There was no mention of Walindah’s father, so I subtly brought him up in conversation. ‘So, where’s your dad?’ I asked.
‘He just . . . disappeared one day,’ Walindah shrugged.
While Yolanda cooked dinner we sat on the front steps watching the passing parade of folk walking home from work or carrying bags of shopping while laughing children played football on the street.
Walindah asked me lots of questions about my life in Australia. She told me that she had hosted a few couch surfers and because she probably would never travel, it was her way of ‘seeing the world’.
‘This way I have the world coming to me,’ Walindah said with a beaming smile.
Walindah’s younger brother Elijah turned up just as dinner was being served. Elijah was unemployed and had been out looking for work. He was even more shy than Walindah. ‘It is hard for Elijah,’ Walindah said, as we sat down for dinner. ‘Eight million people are unemployed in this country, which is almost forty per cent of the population.’
Dinner was a delicious spicy chicken stew with rice and mashed pumpkin. Nobody talked much during dinner because they were all glued to the television getting their daily fix of the soap Egoli: Place of Gold.
‘South Africa didn’t get television until nineteen seventy-six,’ Walindah said during the commercial break. The main reason for the delay was that the white minority regime saw television as a threat to Afrikaans by giving undue prominence to English. There was no undue prominence to English in Egoli: Place of Gold. The show was quadrilingual, and the characters would suddenly switch in mid-sentence from English to Zulu or Afrikaans to Xhosa.
‘It is a very popular show,’ Walindah said. ‘There has been over four thousand episodes.’
I often feel like a linguistic dumbass when I travel, but even more so on this trip. Everyone I’d stayed with so far spoke at least two languages fluently. Walindah spoke five languages: English, Afrikaans, Setswana, Xhosa and Zulu.
Walindah and her mum sure loved watching TV. After Egoli: Place of Gold finished, we watched South African Big Brother followed by South African Who Wants to be a Millionaire. It was exactly like TV at home—I picked up the TV guide and was mortified to see that they also had South African versions of Idol, The Weakest Link, Deal or No Deal, Temptation and even a Survivor South Africa.
‘More people vote on a reality TV show than in an election,’ Walindah told me proudly.
When Walindah turned over to South Africa’s Biggest Loser I feigned a large yawn and slunk off to bed.
It really was like being at home. At 6.30 the next morning, I woke with the same startled fright that I have at the same ungodly hour in Melbourne. I never would have imagined that I’d hear the hissing and humming hydraulics of a hi-tech garbage truck as it picked up wheelie bins from the street in Soweto. The Sowetan suburbs so far seemed amazingly normal.
The loud garbage truck did bring the couch rating down a bit, though.
Couch rating: 8/10
Pro: Walindah’s bed was comfortable
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Con: I felt uncomfortable about stealing Walindah’s bed
After breakfast, Walindah’s mum said that we could borrow her car (bless her, she caught the bus to school instead). I’d timed my visit well because Walindah had a day off—and to be quite honest I was a little bit worried about the idea of wandering around the back streets of Soweto by myself.
Our tour began on a somewhat sombre note. Our first stop was the suburb of Orlando West, which is home to the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, a monument to Soweto youth named after the schoolboy shot dead in the infamous 1976 uprising. What started as a peaceful protest march by youths against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in Black Schools in Soweto escalated into bloody violence as police opened fire on 10 000 students marching from Naledi High School to Orlando Stadium. Walindah’s mum was one of those students.
‘She was fourteen years old,’ Walindah said, as we stood in front of a photo of terrified school kids screaming under a cloud of tear gas. ‘She got away before the police started shooting everyone.’
Inside the museum was a series of moving photographs and multimedia presentations showing the conditions that led to the student strikes and the subsequent white minority’s violent reaction. The most disturbing, yet poignant, photograph was the iconic shot that sparked the world’s outrage. Running through a suburban street is Mbuysia Makhubu, his face contorted by grief and disbelief, with the bloody and lifeless body of 12-year-old Hector Pieterson in his arms. Hector had been shot in the back while he scurried away towards safety. Hector was just one of 556 who were killed by the South African police.
The impact of the Soweto protests reverberated through the country, drawing the world’s attention to the plight of black South Africans, resulting in international sanctions and eventually the end of Apartheid.
Outside the museum was a memorial stone where Hector Pieterson had fallen.
‘That could have been my mum,’ Walindah said. ‘She was a lucky one.’
We drove around the corner from the museum to Vilakazi Street, a normal suburban street with one mighty claim to fame. This small street has been home to two Nobel Peace Prize winners: Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Nelson Mandela’s old house is now a museum run by Winnie Mandela. Walindah told me that she lives in a secure mansion two blocks away and can occasionally be seen cruising the area in a white Mercedes with bulletproof windows.
Inside Mandela’s house the walls were adorned with photos and tributes, including countless honorary degrees and a formal apology from America’s Central Intelligence Agency for its involvement in his persecution. To be frank, though, I thought most of the house, like the jackal bedspread and Winnie’s army boots at the end of the bed, was all a bit tacky—particularly the hawkers out the front selling Nelson Mandela T-shirts, Nelson Mandela mugs and plastic jars filled with ‘dirt from Nelson Mandela’s backyard’.
Archbishop Tutu still lived in his grey, two-storey house, but he must have felt a little jealous. No one was selling Archbishop Tutu mugs out the front of his house.
‘This is the most dangerous part of Soweto,’ Walindah said, as we later drove through the middle of the ghettos of Zola and White City past impoverished street traders with scant arrays of truly pathetic produce laid out before them on the sandy footpath in front of their homes. Their ‘homes’ were self-made shacks of corrugated metal and wire.
‘This area is notorious for gangs of armed car hijackers,’ Walindah said without even a hint of panic in her voice.
‘Should we be here in a . . . in a car then?’ I said with quite a bit more than a hint of panic in my voice.
‘It’s okay,’ Walindah assured me. ‘But, we’d be mad crazy driving through here at night.’
I wasn’t that surprised when Walindah then said, ‘The tour buses don’t come here.’
‘Where do the tour buses go?’ I asked.
‘I will show you the tourist slums,’ Walindah said brightly.
We pulled into the small gravel car park for the ‘tourist slums’ next to a small tour bus and a few souvenir stalls. One stall was selling ‘Authentic South African wood carvings’. Most of the woodcarvings were of giraffes and looked suspiciously as if they came from the Wamunyu collective in Kenya.
Walindah arranged with a local boy named ‘Brilliant’, after a somewhat hefty donation from me, to view the shack that he shared with his mother and sister. Although I knew the ‘donation’ was well needed, I felt uncomfortable about having a gawk at a stranger’s poverty.
‘It’s okay,’ Walindah whispered as we were led down a dirt track lined with tiny shacks that had stones holding the roofs in place and were covered in plastic sheeting to prevent the rain turning the dirt floors to mud. ‘This is how they make their living.’
Women in large bright dresses flashed us large bright smiles as we wandered past yards filled with rows of maize drying in the sun next to piles of rubbish and old rusted cars. Brilliant’s shack was painted bright red and had lovely lace curtains in the window. Inside, the family shared a few square metres with one table and one bed. With no electricity or running water in the area, the house was heated with a paraffin stove and they used buckets for showers. They did have a television set powered by a car battery, though. ‘See, they can watch the soaps, too,’ Walindah said.
On the way back to the car we strolled past a church, which was more like a large tin shack. We only knew it was a church because we could hear the service inside, where a gospel choir was singing joyous hymns in Xhosa and English. We peeked through a gap in the door and were immediately dragged in and welcomed by a grey-bearded priest in a bright yellow flowing robe and large red cape decorated with white tassels. Although the room was dark it was virtually aglow with a flock of women in long white robes and white hats singing, wailing, clapping their hands and swaying with an outpouring of devotion. It was like a sauna in the tin shed and after a few minutes the sweat was pouring off me in buckets.
When we stepped back onto the street, Walindah told me about the time Bill Clinton came to visit Soweto and went to a church service. ‘The priest gave the sermon,’ Walindah said with a giggle ‘. . . about adultery.’
By way of contrast, we then drove to Diepkloof where ‘the millionaires and crime bosses of Soweto live’. This was the posh part of Soweto, with three-storey mansions behind high walls and electric gates that looked just like the fortress homes of the white suburbs I’d passed in the city. All the roads were freshly tarred and there were BMWs in the driveways and well-dressed children playing in the gardens.
There were more glistening BMWs and chrome-plated Toyota four-wheel drives lining the street outside Sakhumzi Restaurant, a few doors up from Archbishop Tutu’s house, where we stopped for dinner. We sat outside in the garden, where young men in designer suits mixed with young men in trendy ghetto gear.
‘Would you like me to order some traditional South African food?’ Walindah asked, after we were shown to our table.
Our traditional South African entrée was a plate of fat black slimy worms that were ‘gently simmered’ and came served with peanut butter and tomato relish. I may have grimaced a bit because Walindah said, ‘They’re not really worms, they’re Mopani worms which are actually the caterpillars of the emperor moth.’
Oh, that made me feel much better.
‘Mopani worms are very nutritious,’ Walindah said, as I very, and I do mean very, tentatively picked up a worm. ‘They are sixty per cent protein and have lots of calcium,’ Walindah added. When I popped the worm into my mouth, the first crunch wasn’t so bad. It tasted like burnt sausage. Then the second crunch let loose the slimy insides which tasted exactly as I had feared a worm would taste like. As if someone had blown their nose into my mouth.
It wasn’t until I’d eaten a couple that I noticed Walindah hadn’t touched them.
‘I’m not eating them,’ she said, screwing up her face. ‘They’re disgusting.’
I didn’t think I could st
omach the traditional main course, either. It was umgodu, otherwise known as stomach. The plate of white rubbery-looking tripe came with umxushu (beans), wheat bread and crushed corn. The crushed corn and beans were delicious. I pushed the tripe around the plate, so it looked as if I’d eaten some.
‘Can we go to a shebeen?’ I asked Walindah when we got back to her house. I’d noticed that there was a shebeen (which is an illicit bar) only a short walk up the road from Walindah’s house.
When we got to the shebeen, Walindah said, ‘I won’t stay. This is a man’s bar, but I will find someone to look after you.’ She scanned the small crowd sitting out the front and walked over to a young fellow with arms as thick as my thighs. ‘He is my friend’s cousin. He will look after you and walk you home later,’ Walindah said. ‘It is probably not a good idea to go inside,’ Walindah added before she turned to head back. ‘There are a lot of drunk crazy people inside.’
As soon as Walindah left, my new friend said, ‘Come inside.’
When I walked in many of the patrons stared at me as if to say ‘What are you doing here?’ It wasn’t an angry ‘What do you think you are doing here?’ It was more of a ‘How have you managed to get so completely lost as to end up here?’ Not surprisingly I was the only umlungu or whitey in the shebeen, and probably the first to ever to step foot into the bar.
One man with bloodshot eyes and sporting a blue work suit staggered over and shook my hand. ‘I am your friend,’ he spluttered.
We grabbed a beer and sat outside and I was immediately surrounded by a group of young men. They were all talking at once, asking me to buy them beer, and if I ‘want an African girl’. Two handed me bits of paper with their addresses on them so I could write to them and then ‘sponsor’ them to come to Australia. My ‘minder’ went back inside the bar, leaving me with a large but quite effeminate young fellow to ‘look after me’. ‘Did you know that South African men have the biggest dicks in the world?’ my new minder said, giving me a wink.
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