Soweto, an acronym for "South West Township," was originally built as segregated housing for transient black mineworkers. Some of the old barracks buildings still stand, although here, as elsewhere in the country (including the shantytowns near the Cape Town airport) the government is doing its best to upgrade slum-dwellers to modern middle-class-style housing:
There is still much abject poverty in Soweto -- many people don't yet have running water, and need to fetch it from a communal pump:
But there is also at least one neighborhood of comfortable middle-class housing ....
... and even a country club and shopping mall, which we saw from afar. And it is rife with the sites of protests and battles against the former apartheid government, including this Roman Catholic church, which the white army stormed in 1976 during the uprising that led to the divestiture movement and ultimately to the end of apartheid:
To this day, you can see bullet holes in various parts of the sanctuary of the church, and in panels from the windows that the caretaker has saved to show to visitors:
The 1976 uprising began as a protest by black students against the white government's decision to make them take all their classes in Afrikaans, a language many of them did not even speak. One of the first casualties was a 12-year-old boy, Hector Pieterson, gunned down while unarmed and protesting peacefully.
A museum now stands near the spot, but a better museum opened more recently between Soweto and downtown Johannesburg. Called the Apartheid Museum, it vividly recreates life under the segregationist regime:
I could not have imagined, back in 1984, that apartheid would end peacefully and with a real degree of reconciliation between the races. It is a tribute to all South Africans that it did.
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