Mandela’s Dream
In the centenary year of the great man’s birth, South Africa is finally back in good hands
ASOMBRE building on the edge of Johannesburg has two entrance turnstiles, one for blankes (whites) the other for nie-blankes (non-whites). The randomly selected admission ticket categorises me nie-blanke and I must pass through the separate turnstile into the acrid legacy of South Africa’s apartheid system, whose races are separated by steel and glass.
The whites section highlights South Africa’s buoyant economy, the reasoning and justification behind Apartheid’s founders, trumpeting the country’s prosperity driven by access to cheap black labour and high valued gold.
The walls of my ‘nie-blankes’ corridor are repressive and prison-like, papered with the passbooks used to control the movement of Black South Africans.
Numerous faces, young and old, male and female stare out from the passbook open pages. Eyes are fearful, full of resignation, defiant, helpless. Race classification laws and skin colour dictates where people live, work and are buried after they die. Sex across the colour bar is punishable by imprisonment.
Here inside South Africa’s Apartheid Museum we follow the harrowing story of one of the most repressive regimes in history and the rise and fall of segregation and oppression.
Part of the museum is devoted to the Father of Modern South Africa, Nelson Mandela, who passed away in 2013. He would have been 100 this summer. His life and times are chronicled, the long years of imprisonment, how he helped South Africa into coming to terms with its past through forgiveness, working for
a better future. Mandela built a new nation from the fragments of conflict and all year long his legacy is being celebrated here.
We move on to the reality of the darkest days of South Africa’s turbulent past. Skeletal sweating gold miners, whose toil so enriched their oppressors, gaze hollow-eyed from the gloom of mine shafts into the photographer’s lens. Children lie on their tummies trying to write in school jotters. Their schools have neither desks nor chairs.
An architect of apartheid Paul Sauer on a crackling small black and white TV tells the interviewer ‘black men learn to like work; we’ve taught them to be a pride unto their women by working’. He adds ‘these people are underdeveloped and would fall to pieces without us’.
The road map for apartheid that the ‘purified’ National Party led by Prime Minister DF Malan devised has sinister similarities to the racial domination that America’s Deep South was enforcing through its Jim Crow laws and Afrikaners drew much support and guidance from that, maintaining close contacts with their US racist counterparts.
We pass signs for segregated telephone kiosks and dry cleaners’ shops, European lady restrooms and non-white toilets. There was blanket censorship of all material considered hostile with even my childhood favourite Black Beauty a casualty.
Political executions, detention without trial and solitary confinement – the evidence is all here and 131 nooses are suspended from a ceiling to mark the number of political prisoners hanged during apartheid. The cells are reconstructed to the correct scale – a metre in width.
Suspicious deaths in custody and the official explanations read ‘found dead in her cell’, ‘fell down the stairs’, ‘took his own life’ and ‘slipped on a bar of soap’. Our superb guide over several days in Johannesburg Charles Ncube (38) is visibly pained during this part of the tour. His mother was arrested by police at the family home in Soweto in 1986 and they never saw her again. ‘She was a member of a street committee during the protests and they wanted information on activists, she was tortured and her body was dumped in a swamp. It took years before we discovered what happened and her murderers were given amnesty”.
The mood lightens in Soweto, ground zero of the Anti-Apartheid struggle and a must-see where we lunch under canopies of palms before setting out on Lebo’s Tuk Tuk tour to explore a small part of the vast township. We stop off at historic sites in Orlando West, view life on the streets and learn about pivotal events of the past.
Soweto has turned into an interesting tourism hotspot offering cycle tours and even skateboard adventures as well as Tuk Tuk rides through its maze of shanty-lined streets and prosperous districts. We are waved at by children and adults, pleased to see welcome tourist revenue flowing in. The entertaining Tuk Tuk tours (www.sowetobackpackers.com) which include a buffet lunch of hot dishes cooked over an open fire in a tropical garden costs €33 for two hours and is worth that. ‘People used to say our townships were dangerous but we will show you another side of life, driver Lungile Mbangula vows.
ONCE a dusty gold mining camp, Johannesburg has been named by prestigious GQ magazine as ‘the cool capital of the Southern Hemisphere’ and the city works strenuously to shed its unsafe image. Driving through sprawling suburbs it is nevertheless a bit unsettling for first-timers noticing the level of security everywhere, walls festooned with ‘armed response’ and similar signs, homes hidden behind high walls, barbed wire and steel-enforced gates.
By the end of the 1980s, white expats were fleeing Johannesburg’s City Business District moving to Fort Knox-like suburbs, protected by electric fences and savage guard dogs. As apartheid began to crumble squatters took over many of the high-rise CBD (city business district) apartments built for the white skilled workers recruited from Europe. With the early 1990s people in search of work and a better life from neighbouring African countries were pouring into the downtown districts. Crime became endemic with newspapers full of murders, car-jackings, armed robberies and drugs-related offences.
There are concerns for personal safety in this melting pot of over 10 million with an estimated 42% unemployment but the situation is improving. Urban regeneration projects are turning the tide in a number of neighbourhoods especially Braamfontein and Maboneng.
We visit a craft market in Maboneng cultural precinct and a wonderfully colourful food market Neighbourgoods in Braamfontein. The weekend market is filled with locals and tourists, enjoying the fare from Boer (Dutch)-cheeses to Pakistani curries plus cakes that would be the envy of the Great British Bake Off and delicious alcoholic (gin & Tonic!) ice lollies.
The talk is all of South Africa’s former President Jacob Zuma now facing a litany of charges of corruption, money laundering and fraud. ‘Great news, it shows no one is above the law and the judicial system is not afraid to do the right thing; corruption has crippled South Africa,’ says Marian, a white third generation South African. ‘I love this beautiful country” and we’ve a great future if the new President Cyril Ramaphosa gets it right’.
Nearby Tumi Molosi is doing a brisk trade with his popular Black Panther burgers. A Zulu (like Zuma) he says ‘tribalism is becoming less of an issue , we must work together as one to make South Africa great’.
Jozi is a city of quirky reasonably priced restaurants and the wines are outstanding.
We eat international and local specialities at Melrose Arch in Sandton (and have our faces painted between courses) Pata Pata in Maboneng and 44 on Stanley.
Street art, crafts, buskers, cool
restaurants and bars continually spring up in and around former 'mean streets’. Regeneration movers and shakers we meet are full of optimism for Jozi’s future in 'everybody’s new South Africa’. Inner city activist and tour guide Jo Buitendach, founder of the Past Experiences Walking Tour company (www.pastexperiences.co.za) says: 'The nice thing about Joburg is there are places that offer a soft landing, which let people experi-ence the city in a way that won’t freak them out’. We tour an NGO, originally set up to help street kids start their own businesses. It’s name is ‘I was Shot in Joburg’. It is devoted to art, postcards, wood blocks and other cool stuff with the tag ‘we only like to shoot here with a camera’.