South Africa Day Eight: Johannesburg

Over breakfast we discussed with the guesthouse owner, a German lady named Gisela, what our options were to spend the morning in Joburg while we waited for our friend, Maggie, to become free around lunchtime. She recommended that we take a Soweto tour run by a friend of hers who also has a guesthouse nearby. So at 9:30 he showed up and took us out for a ride.

Our first stop on the tour was to see downtown Johannesburg. The city reminds me of nothing so much as Detroit, since the area in the central city is largely derelict and, other than a few stalwart companies, most have moved out of the city to a new suburb called Sandton. We ascended to the top of the tallest building in Africa, the 50-story tall Carlton Tower, to see a panorama of the city, which really made it clear that the city has seen better days. Many of the buildings are unoccupied, and some that were officially unoccupied are now squatter villages. Clearly this is not a place to be after dark.

We did see some signs of revitalization, though. The former DeBeers building looks like it’s being well kept as an office block for some other company, and several banks are building new HQs in the area. Still, there are no hotels beyond a 1- or 2-star in the city, which is really amazing for the commercial center of Africa’s biggest economy.

Our guide took us to a very interesting little shop in the downtown area. It was a Zulu “muti” or witch doctor’s shop, decked out in all sorts of barks, bones, and hides that have medicinal properties, and a small traditional thatched hut in the back where the doctor would read your ailments and prescribe a solution.

From downtown we drove out to Soweto, which I never before realized was an acronym (for South West Townships). Soweto is not far from downtown Joburg, and even driving at the glacially slow pace that our guide preferred, we were there in no time. Soweto was not quite what I was expecting; whereas I anticipated just a relentless slum of dilapidated housing, in fact the area is more like a mini city, with neighborhoods of varying character, some wealthy, some middle class, and some poor (in some cases, poorer than poor). The government is required to provide housing to all citizens, so it builds lots of small houses with a few small rooms and a kitchen, and many of those can be seen in Soweto. They are often not badly maintained, with fresh paint jobs and manicured lawns, though in some cases, particularly those occupied by the unemployed, there just is no money for that and the houses look a bit worse off. The occupants are meant to pay rent and for utilities, but in some cases they cannot afford it, so they basically live rent-free.

In some areas, where the people are quite poor, the houses have no power or water, but to maintain some sanitary salubriousness the government has installed port-a-potties that serve the community. Even in the areas that are home to the illegal immigrants from elsewhere in Africa (who are not entitled to the free housing), areas that are filled with roughly made shacks of scraps of wood and tin with corrugated roofs, there are port-a-potties in a nod by the government to the fact that there is no getting rid of those people.

We visited the area called Orlando West, and one street there that is home to two Nobel laureates, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela (we also saw Winnie Mandela’s rather grand pile). The Mandela house has become a museum with memorabilia from his life. This was the only house we could go into, and it was comfortable though quite small, and you can still see bullet holes where the police shot into the place while Winnie was living there.

Also in Orlando West was the Hector Pieterson memorial, commemorating the spot where, on June 16, 1976, school children from Soweto who were peacefully protesting a decision by the government to change from English to Afrikaans as the medium of instruction, were shot at by the police, killing a young boy named Hector Pieterson, who is now recognized as the first victim of the struggle that ultimately led to the collapse of the apartheid government.

On the way back to Johannesburg we saw the new stadium going up for the 2010 World Cup and several new malls that have sprung up in the Soweto area as part of the initiatives to revitalize the economies of the townships (where previously it was government policy to have no organized stores or businesses or other economic activity at all, but rather relegating the townships to nothing more than housing estates for black workers who would have to commute into the cities for work).

Our guide brought us back to our guesthouse in time to meet Maggie to go out for lunch. By this time the clouds that had covered the city had started to part, and we ate outside in lovely sunshine for a change. Lunch was excellent, and was followed by a visit to a crafts market to see about picking up some gifts for people back home, though we only managed to find a painting for ourselves. We also stopped in a safari outfitter’s shop to pick up some jackets to wear in Kruger, where it can apparently get quite cold at night (we managed to forget to bring our jackets when we left Beijing). We returned to Maggie’s and Jonathan’s house to pick up their Jeep that they are letting us use for the trip, along with several books on the animals of the parks, a cool box with ice packs, and a pile of maps.

Maggie helped us to book a massage at a nearby Thai spa to help me get a crick out of my back that was getting more and more bothersome. This gave us our first taste of driving in Joburg, which was a bit tricky but in the end we emerged at the spa unscathed. From the spa we returned to our guesthouse to get organized for our trip, and then met up with Maggie again for dinner at Soulsa, a hip new place in the hip area of Melville. Excellent food once again (ostrich bobotie spring rolls for me to start, followed by delicious lamb shank, and a warm vegetable salad for J2 followed by oxtail and gnocchi, all washed down by a phenomenal Cabernet Sauvignon called Whole Berry by Springfield Estate. After dinner we went to a bar nearby to meet a friend of Maggie’s for a drink, an Indian fellow who moved here 11 years ago from Calcutta, before returning to our guesthouse for the night.