Monday, January 17, 2005
Day 15 Johannesburg and Soweto
17 January 2005
Greetings from Johannesburg!
The day started out early for a group of us who decided to go for an early morning run. The elevation here is comparable to Denver, but the exercise helped us start the day out right. After eating breakfast, our tour guides for the day, Percy and William, picked us up at our B&B to show us around Johannesburg and Soweto.
To begin, we drove through downtown Johannesburg and saw some of the rougher areas. The towering apartment buildings offered glimpses of a better, safer time for Johannesburg. We made our first stop at Constitutional Hill, which is the home of the Constitutional Court and an old jail that both Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi spent some time at during their resistance campaigns. We got a chance to walk through the cells and see what the conditions were like for the prisoners.
After seeing the jail, we walked through Constitutional Court, a place where many important decisions were made by the eleven judges who work there, such as abolishing the death penalty in South Africa.
Our next stop was one of the most interesting ones thus far. We paid a visit to the Faraday Medical Center, but it isn't the typical medical facility. It is the site where traditional healers (a.k.a. witch doctors) set up booths with all their roots and skulls so people can come to them and be healed. The healer we saw had a wide assortment of ground up plants and animal skins and bones which he uses to help people with a variety of illnesses, ranging from cramps and headaches to sexually transmitted diseases. Let's just say we weren't really expecting to see what we saw at the Faraday Medical Center. It just added to the multitude of eye-opening experiences we've had here in South Africa.
We then got back into our bus and drove to Soweto, a township outside of Johannesburg, which is the home for about three million people. The name comes from South West Township because millions of blacks were moved there during apartheid. We ate lunch at a restaurant there and enjoyed some more traditional African food, including pap, rice, and chicken.
The restaurant was located on Vilakazi Street, the only street in the world where two Nobel Peace Prize winners lived, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. We partially saw their houses from the street, but high gates and guards kept us from looking too closely.
Soweto was the site of many uprisings during the apartheid years. One of the biggest was the youth revolt against learning Afrikaans in schools on June 16, 1976. Thousands of students marched the streets on the morning of the 16th until the police began throwing stones and striking back against the kids, resulting in the death of over seventy students. One of the first people killed was Hector Pieterson, a thirteen year old boy whose death represents the brutality and hate from that day. We also visited the museum that tells the story of the Soweto uprising.
We made a stop at the Regina Mundi church which was a center of political opposition during apartheid and site of a police shootout.
After leaving the museum, we drove through other parts of Soweto, only seeing bits and pieces because of its enormous size. On the way back to Emerald Guest House, our tour guides introduced us to some South African popular music, providing us with a peek inside the youth culture in South Africa.
We made it back safely in time for dinner and then listened to two presentations about mining and industry, preparing us for the next day. We tried to turn in early so we would be able to wake up for our 5:30 departure to the mines. Yet another exciting day in Africa, exceeding our expectations one day at a time.
Goodbye everyone and I can't wait to see you soon!
~Laura