Urban Experiences: Durban, Johannesberg, and Soweto

Our stint in backpackerland took a welcome break when we arrived in Durban, South Africa's third-largest city and the southern hemisphere's busiest port. Although the Baz Bus didn't drop us off there until close to midnight, our SERVAS hosts, Alex and Tracey, picked us up and brought us home for a curry dinner with their two cats, Candy and Gidgy. Alec is a lifelong Durban resident; Tracey grew up in rural KwaZulu-Natal (Zululand), and has lived in Durban for many years. (Tracey now runs a Zulu crafts cooperative, working closely with local women and taking regular trips to various parts of the world to sell the goods.) They are enthusiasts of both their city and their region, and provided us with a wonderful introduction to the area. This included sampling Durban's iconic food, bunny chow-- an Indian curry served inside a hollowed-out quarter loaf of bread. Durban has the world's largest Indian population outside of India, and much of the food of the city is reflective of that, but the particular story of bunny chow is that it was used in past days (when servants were the rule and styrofoam didn't exist) as a way for servants to carry hot lunches to their bosses. The word for boss sounded, to English ears, something like "bunny", and so what had been called "boss chow" got its new name.

We spent some of our first day in Durban hanging out downtown, after successfully visiting the U.S. Consulate to get additional visa pages added to our passports. We visited an impressive art museum in the City Hall, which also has a natural history museum and a library branch, and walked around the surrounding streets a bit. We really liked the feel of the city-- vibrant was the main word that kept coming to mind, with the streets full of people walking, shopping, eating, and working. There was a dense concentration of small businesses, and a swarming outdoor market with long lines at the bunny chow stand. Alec estimates that, since the end of apartheid, when the restrictions on which "race" could live in the city finally ended, the population of Durban has shifted from about 95% white to 95% non-white. It felt a bit like walking around Park Street in Hartford. Also like Hartford, Durban has been busily developing its waterfront, although we must admit that the scale of their projects certainly dwarfs ours. Durban's municipal budget runs in the black, even as they build new stadiums for World Cup 2010 and keep the city beachfront in beautiful shape. We spent a thoroughly unintellectual but very fun day at the largest waterfront development, an aquarium and water-park where we oggled unlikely-looking fish, watched a dolphin show, and scooted down water slides.

Arriving in Johannesburg had quite a different feel, as the Baz Bus drove from one extensively-secured suburban hostel to another. Our hostel ran regular shuttles to a couple different places in the city-- the museum, a mall-- but strongly discouraged walking anywhere, and did not offer any opportunities to go out at night, such as for a jazz show as we'd been hoping. We felt pretty stuck, between the fear that the hostel worked to instill in us and, moreso, the high cost of getting around by taxi, given the dismal state of public transportation in the city. Every house in the suburbs had a solid fence topped with razor-wire, a gated driveway, a sign warning passers-by of armed guards on call. Is this how Canadians look at Americans, with our alarm systems and locked doors?


The first of our two days in Jo'burg was spent at the Apartheid Museum, an extensive, moving collection. I was very impressed with the museum both from a historiographic perspective and from a tourist's perspective. The museum was chock full of well-presented artifacts-- video footage of speeches and police beatings, photos, decrees, etc.-- and, through a smart counterpuntal exhibit, analyzed the factors behind the rise of apartheid, the effects of apartheid on life in South Africa, and the resistance to apartheid thoughtfully and simultaneously. The explanation, for instance, of how race and class were manipulated by the nationalist leaders to leverage the support of poor Afrikaaners was nuanced without being exculpating; the presentation of resistance movements and leaders was similarly complex, not idolatrous. We spent hours reading the texts and examining the photos, and could have spent much longer. But the museum was also well set up for the large portion of visitors who don't have or want to spend so much time; just walking through the exhibits, as we saw many people doing, one could still get a strong sense of the horrors of apartheid and the power of resistance. In our view, they missed a lot, but at least they got something.

We did have a rather unpleasant experience leaving the museum: the taxi we were in broke down on the highway, and we had to sit in it for 45 minutes waiting for another taxi from the same company to retrieve us. And then they wanted to be paid the full (and very high) fare! We disagreed.

Our second day in Jo'burg, and last day in South Africa, was spent in Soweto. Until we actually spent time there, Soweto loomed in somewhat mythic proportions in our heads: the center of the great student resistance movement that started in 1976, the one-time home to leaders like Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu-- and also one of the world's most notorious ghettoes, a word synonomous with poverty and despair. So we thought. The Soweto we were introduced to, in a day of walking and taking local minibuses with a local guide, Eunice, was immeasurably more multilayered, more alive, and more spirited than anything we had ever read or heard about it had led us to believe.

We spent time in three neighborhoods-- the first surprise for us being that Soweto HAD neighborhoods. What we had pictured as a monolithic area of shacks was actually a whole metropolis in itself, home to 4 million people (a Kiwi we met that morning said that was equal to the whole country of New Zealand). We started in Orlando East, a working-class area composed almost entirely of the brick homes that every family is entitled to apply for once. Many of these one-room houses had been added onto (at the owner's expense); many also had one or more shacks in the backyard, lived in sometimes by family members in Soweto seeking work, sometimes by renters who were on the waiting list for a government house. Our first stop was in the shack where one of the guides lived, where we spent some time talking to her sister-in-law, who is a local activist focusing on issues of violence against women. As we left the shack and walked along the streets, we were struck by the absence of security fences, and the presence of children playing and people walking-- streetlife that was absent from the suburban area where the hostel was. We were also shown the house where Mpanza, known as "the father of Soweto" for his fight to get housing built there, had lived.

Leaving Orlando East, we took a minibus to Kliptown, a severely neglected area that fit more closely to our prior image of Soweto. This neighborhood has neither electricity nore plumbing, garbage pick-up nor schools: the government wants people to leave the area, has wanted this for decades, and therefore does not provide any services to it. But of course the fact is that people do live there, lots of people, and the government's refusal to acknowledge this has only exacerbated the situation. On the outskirts of Kliptown, we visited the homes of two interesting people. The first, Porto Lollan, was a 75 year old "coloured" man whose house, under the initiation of his late brother, had hosted secret meetings of Mandela and other leaders in the years before they were imprisoned. He had an interesting collection of photos and newspaper articles, but we were quite put-off actually talking to him, as he said something like "Black people aren't fit to be president." After him, though, we met an extremely inspiring man, Bob, who ran an NGO called Soweto-Kliptown Youth. He himself had been an abandoned child, taken in by a local activist and, in his words, told that he mattered and given a chance at life. He has used that chance to work tirelessly and effectively to improve the lives of Kliptown children, running a variety of programs and initiatives. He now has links with a charitable fund of the NBA, and photos of giant basketball players sitting in too-small plastic chairs in Kliptown, watching children performs gumboots dances, line his walls. In his work, he has also deeply touched the lives of some American children; he runs an exhange program with the exclusive Nobles School in Boston, and has received emails from the parents of the privileged students who have spent time in Soweto saying they don't know what he did, but they thank him for the effects that time had on their children.

Our final stop of the day was Orlando West, now Soweto's wealthiest neighborhood (referred to as Beverly Hills), and the location of the main sights that tourists usually see. (We saw several groups of tourists, in vans and buses, stopping off for a few minutes at these places, on the "Soweto tours" offered by every travel agency-- we were so thankful that a man we'd met at Inkosana had told us about the walking tour instead!) These sights were certainly powerful: the corner where a 13 year old boy, Hector Pieterson, was shot by police in 1976, the first casualty of the Soweto student uprising; the memorial museum for Hector Pieterson, overseen by his sister; Vilakazi Street, where Tutu and Mandela lived and where Pieterson was shot. But what will stick with us even more is the feeling of walking around the Soweto streets, of spending time in a neighborhood in the full sense of the word-- a real place, with problems certainly, but also with pride, with spirit, with identity.