Johannesburg
If I had been at home in America the most significant thing that would have happened to me today would have been the loss of my ATM card. For folks like me who rarely carry hard cash, losing access to your funds is akin to being denied a much- needed blood transfusion on your dying bed.
But I’m not in America. And after everything I’ve seen during the past couple of days—Soweto, the Regina Mundi Church, site of a major confrontation between police and student activists during the 1976 Soweto uprising, the Hector Pietersen (sometimes spelled Peterson) Museum and the Apartheid Museum, I found it very easy to get over losing a piece of plastic. Thankfully, I had another seldom-used ATM card and thank God I remembered the pin number.
But even if that lifeline hadn’t been tucked in between my Diner’s Club and Visa cards, I’d still be OK. Why? I’m in a country in which 5.5 of its 45 million residents have AIDS or are HIV positive and where people are still reeling from the residual effects of Apartheid. It’s all about perspective. And while it doesn’t appear that the tensions of the past are affecting the daily lives of people in this city, I see that as a good and bad thing.
I say that because I don’t think you can ever get too comfortable after decades of oppression despite the current laws that enable you to vote, live where you want and enjoy all the other comforts of democracy. We’ve all seen what’s happening in America now thanks in part to a black man running for President. Some of the more unpleasant realities of our insidious past have come back to haunt us.
But check this out. There are posters all over Johannesburg of Barack Obama with the caption “Go Further.” I’ve not seen one of those in the good ‘ol US of A. Maybe they know something we don’t.
Launch Slide Show!
Soweto
I didn’t have the emotional reaction I thought I would have during my tour of Soweto (Southwestern townships) because for one thing, a lot of people there are living well. Quite well. Some of the homes there are worth nearly a million dollars and parts of it look like Beverly Hills. Today Soweto is home to business owners, politicians and ordinary citizens whose resolve has helped them moved past the indignities of Apartheid.
It was so unlike the images I had been force-fed during the Apartheid years—and beyond.
En route to the Hector Pietersen Museum I saw the rich and the poor, the happy and the happier, the young and the old, the enlightened and disillusioned. I saw women carrying about 50 pounds of produce on their heads, I met black hotel owners and carefree young boys skateboarding down the street. I interacted with men and women operating portable vegetable and fruit stands and also tried to communicate with some people who had no idea what I was saying and vice-versa.
These are the rich experiences that enable you to move past whatever drama is happening in your own life. All you have to do is look in their faces and see the hope of those who were once hopeless.
That, my friends, is priceless.
One of the more moving experiences of the day was having a couple of young boys sing for me. Sure, they wanted a few rand for their efforts but it was well worth it to hear them sing a song expressing their pride in their country. So young. So innocent. It was a wonderful thing. And one of them actually sounded like a young Luther.
I was also very touched by the text, photo and video exhibits in the Pietersen Museum. On June 16, 1976, Hector Pietersen was killed by white policeman during the Soweto uprising. He was only 13. Outside the museum is a famous photo of another teen, Mbuyisa Makhubo, carrying Pietersen’s dead body. Makhubo disappeared shortly after the photo was taken and hasn’t been heard from since.
Crazy.
Joe Motsogi, 54, our tour guide, is a former member of the African National Congress who was jailed for eight months following the Soweto uprising for spearheading the freedom movement at his school. Even though Joe is proud of his activist past, he stressed the point that he is now a tour guide and is doing all he can to increase tourism in his native land. “It’s important to forgive, but you must also remember,” he said while driving us through some of the rougher parts of Soweto. He also said that race relations had improved in some parts of South Africa but that there were still issues in the rural areas.
“There, blacks and whites are still like water and oil,” he said.
I concluded my time in Johannesburg with a sobering tour of the Apartheid Museum on a rainy and chilly Saturday afternoon. Once you arrive you are given laminated cards that say “white” or “non-white” and you must go through the proper entrance. For those of us old enough to remember when Jim Crow was just in a shallow grave, that’s a bit trippy. But before you know it, everyone—the black, the white, “coloured” and Indian—are thrown back together to experience the evolution of one of mankind’s most oppressive crimes against humanity via video, photos and text.
It’s harsh. Some people didn’t make it all the way through because they were so overcome with emotion. At the end of the tour you’re happy that Nelson Mandela and the South African people prevailed, but there’s nothing or no one who can answer the one question you have as you pass through the final exhibit celebrating the end of Apartheid.
Why?
