Last Sunday I visited the
Soweto townships. Townships are the areas to which black people were relegated under Apartheid. I was told never to go into Soweto, or for that matter, any of the townships on my own. So I found I a tour group that drives through. (Nevermind the irony of paying $120 USD to go see the poorest areas of South Africa).
Soweto is just a few minutes drive outside Johannesburg. (Hence the name, SOuth WEstern TOwnships). Under Apartheid, all the blacks who flocked to Johannesburg in search of employment were forcibly removed to make room for whites. This was often done against their will, and all their homes and belonging were often bulldozed in the process.
The transfer of minorities to peripheral areas was made possible by legislation that meticulously categorized people by race and allowed them to be limited to certain housing areas on that basis.
The conditions in Soweto have improved dramatically, so I was told, especially in the past five years. My black tour guide went to great lengths to point out this out at every turn.
“You can tell by the children,” he said, slowing down the van and pointing flagrantly. “Look at that one! He is not going to church or to a party. That is just the way he dress.”
Indeed the kids wore bright, clean, logo-smothered clothing. They still live in cramped, relatively uniform housing projects, many of which are the same homes their families lived in during Apartheid. The “improvements” manifest in the fact that people now paint their tiny homes; they decorate their tiny yards and cultivate tiny gardens. They drive beat-up, used cars and sell tires along the streets.
Soweto is currently home to about 60% of the population of Johannesburg. I did not see one white person the entire time I was there.
Along the road, there were hand-written advertisments for "HIV curing tea" and "painless abortions."
The white Afrikaners (former Dutch colonialists) staying in my guesthouse were amazed to hear I went to Soweto.
“I’m not a racist,” one of the women told me at dinner, “but I just don’t understand them. Don’t get me wrong, I know them. I have worked with my maids for more than 35 years. And they are so superstitious and gullible. They just don’t have any common sense. They will believe anything someone tells them.”
I could have sworn she had just ripped out a page of Huckleberry Finn and read it out loud.
“Could you give me an example?” I asked.
“A few weeks ago, a lightning bolt hit a tree in our yard,” she told me. “I asked one of our groundskeepers to go uproot it. He said he could not, because the gods laid an egg under that tree, and he could not touch it. You see, they just don’t make any sense.”
“Yes but in fairness, many people in Western culture believe God created the earth in seven days and that they can absolve their sins by drinking wine and eating bread. I bet your groundskeeper would think that’s ridiculous.”
After spending the day in Soweto, the
Hector Peiterson memorial and the Apartheid museum, I must admit I felt little sympathy when the Afrikaaners in my guesthouse complained that their children had to move out of South Africa to find jobs, because the "biased" post-Apartheid government instituted racial quotas systems in most professions.
Of course, the people in my guesthouse probably had nothing to do with the evils of Apartheid. It was probably unfair for me to blame them. But then again, Apartheid did not spring entirely from the head of Jan Smuts; it was the product of an entire social system.
After a while it struck me that maybe some of my anger towards them stemmed from the fact that, at the end of the day, I am more like the Afrikaaners than I am like the people in Soweto. I am more of a passive facilitator than I am a victim.
When my tour guide took us to Soweto’s squatter camp, the “worst of the worst,” he invited us to get out of the van to take pictures. I was somewhat appalled at the suggestion of jumping out to snap pictures of humans in degenerate conditions, as if they were animals in a zoo. My first thought when he suggested this was that other tourists have probably done this.
As I peered out into the sea of tin roofs and shoebox lean-tos, two children began walking over to me. I knew they were going to beg me for money. I knew this because it happened every other time I had gotten out of the van. I turned for the door instinctively, like I was scared of these tiny, desperate, 6-year-old black boys. But I was scared; I was scared of having to say no to them; I was scared of dealing with my own feelings of guilt again.
The little boys didn't have a van to get back in. I could’ve at least said hi to them, so that they would know that they're not bad or damaged just because they are poor. Instead I did nothing. I got back into my air-conditioned van and went back to my gated community.
