Come to Soweto!

After a late night out with friends that I’d met at the mall earlier yesterday, I rose at the crack of dawn to meet Cedric, a British owner of a tourist company that connects Joburg’s foreign visitors with contacts in Soweto with whom they can explore the vast “city within a city.” Driving into the townships, Cedric provided a fascinating explanation of why South Africa’s national sports teams – in particular their soccer team – have been competing at such a low level in the past decade or so. To summarize, he relayed that since the end of apartheid, persisting segregation in the school system has caused immense funding disparities between predominantly white schools and those that are mostly black (reminiscent of the zoning and busing debates in the U.S.). As a result, most schools in townships like Soweto, where the vast majority of the 4.5 million South Africans are black (all but five, according to my guide), have been forced to cut or eliminate spending on school athletics, in turn crippling crucial feeder communities from providing and grooming talent for national athletic teams. Cedric’s analysis, which he’s backed up with research on the spending patterns of Soweto’s elementary and high schools, is further bolstered by the fact that South Africa’s two white-dominated sports, cricket and rugby, have not been subject to the general slump of the nations other sports.

Once dropped off with Eunice, my gregarious and charming local contact, we slowly made our way through Soweto’s winding alleys to her home. The one bedroom abode was home to her and her two adolescent children. Getting to know her son Dropkyl, I learned that his two favorite songs were the Tupac classics “Dear Mama” and “Hit ’Em Up” – he was flabbergasted when he saw that I could rap nearly the entire first verse of “Dear Mama.” After walking for about an hour to Para – one of Soweto’s central congregating areas that also happens to be the home of the largest hospital in the southern hemisphere – Eunice and I decided to hop on a bus to Kliptown, another of Soweto’s numerous sub-neighborhoods. Arriving, I impetuously decided to buzz my hair off (after all, it was getting pretty warm), and we checked out a number of local markets and shops.

One shop that we entered was actually run by a group of Chinese immigrants. But to my surprise they were of an entirely different breed than the “Huaren” I’d encountered at “China City” the previous day. The ancestors of the Jian’s, the owners of a popular Kliptown market, first came to Johannesburg in the late 1920’s as construction laborers working on developing South Africa’s railroads. When their project was completed, the Jian’s, who had had their first son in South Africa, decided to settle in Johannesburg and start a grocery business. Two generations later, their grandchildren were running the successful market, taking on 6 black employees with whom they converse in perfectly fluent English. “I’m really trying to learn their language, but it’s hard,” Zhang Jian, the Jian’s eldest grandson, told me. “I wish I could speak to them in their native tongues, but some speak Tsonga and others Zulu, so it’s not that easy.”

Prior to my departure, I’d read accounts of South Africa’s Chinese population that generally broke them into two categories – the Chinese that are continually arriving post-apartheid for commercial reasons, and those that are descendants of the Chinese that came as indentured workers in the early 20th century. Interestingly enough, the latter category of Chinese are legally characterized as black, entitling them to post-apartheid compensation and affirmative action-like benefits, while the more numerous new wave Chinese immigrants are put under the same Zulu umbrella term for whites – “mungu”.

Soweto itself was difficult to grasp, if not simply for its sheer enormity then for its overwhelming sense of community. Johannesburg’s residential and commercial sectors seemed to emit a pervasive sense of insecurity: people rarely walked places (almost never after dark), individual houses were surrounded by towering gates with electric wire, and almost all homes employed private security firms to deter break-ins. Soweto, on the other hand, despite its status being perhaps the most renowned slum in the world, felt as if it was brimming with life, energy, and – surprisingly – trust. Noticing that Eunice’s house barely even had a lock at the lone door, I asked her what she fell victim to burglary. Rather than say the police – an organization that nobody seems to favor in South Africa – she reassured me that if someone stole from her, her community would find them and bring them to justice. “Someone will know who it is and tell a community leader, and eventually I’ll get it back,” she told me. “Here in Soweto, I never worry about my safety.”

Returning to the hostel after a long day of exploring the depths of Johannesburg’s largest township, I feel like I’ve learned much more about South Africa as a country. Johannesburg’s city center may be an economic and commercial hub, but Soweto truly felt like the city’s beating pulse, the true heart of South Africa’s largest city.