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Gogo Thoko’s daughter, Khensani, quit her job at a big corporate and closed her hair salon to help with the NGO full time.

“To me, all these gogos are my mothers, and there’s nothing that makes me happier than seeing them relax and get away from their troubles at home,” she says.

I joined one of Gogo on Tour’s silver-group trips. Sponsored by the Baobabes charity and City Sightseeing Johannesburg, it was a four-hour trip around Joburg.

The red-bus city tour started at Gold Reef City but I joined in at their next stop, SAB’s World of Beer in Newtown. Of course, it wasn’t their first time travelling but it was their first time experiencing beer brewing on such a scale.

After watching a video on how traditional beer is made, in an area designed to create a village-like atmosphere, complete with tree stumps serving as seats, we got to taste mqombothi from a traditional clay pot. The pot was passed around and, when it was my turn, I swirled it before drinking, just as my grandmother had taught me. The gentleman seated next to me, Ntate James Makhwelo, 72, was impressed: “Yaah! You even know you have to shake the clay pot before drinking the traditional beer,” he said.

We then hopped back onto the bus for our last stop: the women’s prison at Constitution Hill.

Here, where white prisoners such as the husband-poisoning Daisy de Melker and SACP member Esther Barsel were once held, the inequalities of the old South Africa were plain to see. While the white female prisoners had bigger rooms, books to read and a garden in which to walk around, the gogos compared the black prisoners’ “isolation” cell to a tiny safe.

It was here, in “isolation”, that people such as Winnie MadikizelaMandela and Albertina Sisulu were held after their arrest for political activities.

As they were told to go into the “isolation” cell, the women’s body language and facial expressions showed how frightened they were. One gogo screamed: “What if it closes with us inside?”

“It’s the first time I ever experienced such discrimination and I’m leaving this place sad about how harmless women could have been treated this way,” said Thandi Skhosana.

But, she added: “Thanks to Gogo on Tour, I’m now going to tell my children that, as the youth of today, they’re taking advantage of the sacrifices and suffering that these women went through during apartheid.”

Khoabane was a guest of Baobabes and City Sightseeing Johannesburg. For more info on the bus tour, see