Day 23... Soweto...

It is where Mandela and Desmond Tutu lived and live respectively... Mandela was not from there (he is from a village in the cape), but he moved there and lived there with his first wife, and then with Winnie, and Winnie continued to live there while Nelson was in prison...

The only way it is recommended to go to Soweto is on an organized tour... Our tour guide Fefe picked us up at 9... We were outside waiting and ready to go... We picked up a couple of fellow tourists on the way and drove through downtown Johannesburg on the way to Soweto...

The city of Johannesburg used to be the financial capital of the country, but it is no longer really the case... Sandton, the new city built for wealthy Joburgers to avoid the crime of Jozi has now become one of the financial centres and some other companies and government departments have moved to Pretoria, but downtown Joburg is now mainly a commercial centre...

Drove through and saw some neighbourhoods that were mainly wealthy white areas which have been inhabited by black South Africans... Fefe explained the changes in the areas on the way through and then we arrived in Soweto...

The name derives from South Western Townships... It was an area where black people were moved to from country areas outside of Joburg and came in to work in town... They were like labour camps where men (and men only, wives were not allowed to stay) stayed in dormitory style accommodation. This area expanded and people were not provided with government promised housing and so they moved in to the shacks and huts so often seen on the TV today...

Not all of Soweto is like this, though... As you come in to the township of Soweto, you see some quite nice houses... There are some people in the area, e.g. Winnie Mandela, who live in wealthy houses in Soweto... But as you move through, you see the informal settlements... This means the shacks...

We were led to a guide there who took us through the settlement and then we were shown through a house by one of the residents... The settlement had been in existence since 1994 and this family of 8 had lived in the same three-room house since that time and still had no running water or electricity... This girl could not have been more than 18, so she would know no other lifestyle... We gave her a small donation as well as the tour guide, and drove on to a museum...

The museum was about a student revolt by black students who were being forced to study in Afrikaans... A language entirely unfamiliar to them, and one in which they had no interest... The students started to march and peacefully protest about the fact that they had to study some subjects in Afrikaans... The Police, obviously, started to fire on the protesters and shot and killed a 13-year-old boy named Hector Pieterson... Hector became a symbol of the oppression and violence against a group of schoolchildren by the authorities, and so the museum was named after him...

It had a pretty good rundown of Soweto and some aspects of Apartheid... It was quite emotional too as there was audio and video from the people involved in the student protest, but not too much as many of those people had since fled South Africa, including the boy who picked Hector up and carried him to his family in this picture http://cronkite.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/305px-soweto_riots1.jpg …

We left the museum and went to see Nelson Mandela House... Not Nelson Mandela's House, but the house which had now become a museum to Nelson Mandela or Madiba as he is often referred to... The house was small and humble and had been refurbished to look as it had when Madiba had lived there... The street it is on (Vilakazi Street, for the record) is the only street in the world where 2 Nobel Peace Prize winners had lived... Madiba at this place, and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who still lives on the same street... It's a bit harder to go inside that house...

Once we had left there, our Soweto tour was done, we drove back toward our guesthouse, but not without briefly driving past Mandela's current house (which is right around the corner from the guesthouse)...

Certain times in your life, you reflect upon how good you and most of those you know have it... No-one said anything, but visiting some of those places, really affected all of us in different ways... How this will affect everyone in the long run is yet to be seen...