Soweto

Today Michelle, Prof Ross & I took a tour of Soweto. The name "Soweto" takes the first two letters from "South Western Township"; it was set up as a temporary housing facility in 1904, housed migrant workers in large hostels in the 1940's, and has not changed substantially until the 1980's (electricity first was put in in 1985, and today many people still don't have it). Click here for the wiki on Soweto. The hostels were only made to house the working males, who would be away from their families for months, and so the structures to this day do not have indoor plumbing. Thankfully, they are being replaced by government-made housing.
Soweto has the reputation of being the place that the poor black people live; sometimes called "the heart and soul of South Africa," it is where the 1976 student uprising took place, where the Africa National Congress (ANC) party (the one formerly headed by Nelson Mandela and in power since 1994), and one of the squatter camps there is the home of the main character in the movie Tsotsi (Academy Award for best foreign film 2005).
Photos:

1. Tuck Shop is a general store
2. the tour company set up a preschool; they basically used a shipping container as the storage for the school
3. ladies doing the wash; you can't see it, but there are also pirate electricity wires running from the power lines- when the authorities cut them, more are up by the next day- not very safe but you have to respect the inginuity
   
4. tires along the road with Soweto in the background; during the anti-apartheid struggle, they had this thing called "tire necklaces"- when an informer on the anti-apartheid organizers was found, they put a tire over his/her neck, filled the tire with gasoline, then torched the person as a sign of what would happen to other informers
5. the tour stopped in to see a soccer tournament that was being sponsored by the English Premier League team Manchester United; Wits U is here in yellow; our tour guide played soccer for many years and told us that soccer in South Africa was generally the black sport whereas rugby was historically the white sport; these days sports are integrated
   
6. then we went to visit an unlicensed beer house & drink what the locals drink- homemade beer... it tasted rather sour
7. our tour guide with some of the local kids; our guide is from and lives in Soweto himself
8. a large wall painting inside of Regina Mundi in Soweto of Mandela, Tutu, Biko et. al.
9. outside Regina Mundi Catholic church; this church was very important during the anti-apartheid era as a sanctuary and meeting place for all of the forces; go here for more of its history
10. inside the church there are still bullet holes in the ceiling where soldiers shot both from outside the church into it and from within the church; our guide told us that they keep the bullet holes as evidence
11. our host for the church tour shows us how the corner of the altar was cracked off when a soldier hit it with the butt of his rifle... the MAIN ALTAR IN THE FRONT OF THE CONGREGATION
    
12. the famous Black Madonna, Our Lady of Soweto
    
13. at a shanty town
14. in the same shanty town; the remaining people are being moved into new houses that the government has constructed nearby
15. the Hector Peterson memorial; Hector was a student killed in the June 16, 1976 by the police during a student demonstration about requiring Afrikaans to be a required language in schools; here is the wiki on Hector; one interesting thing I learned was that Hector's family had changed their name to one that sounded more white in the hopes that their children would be classified under apartheid as "colored" instead of "black;" while Hector was classified as "colored," his sister was "black;" there apparently was a committee that determined what your racial apartheid classification was based on your skin tone and hair (e.g. our guide said that for the "pencil test" they put a pencil in your hair- if it stayed you were black, if it fell you were not)
16. Nelson Mandela's old house