TODAY is a big day in South Africa, Mandela Day, designated as such by President Zuma two years ago. A month ago the country celebrated another milestone date. While we were marking Bloomsday with festivities, South Africa had very different reasons to look back at its past.
On June 16th, 1976, the police turned their guns on school students in Soweto who were protesting at the new ruling that all teaching must be through the medium of Afrikaans. A 13-year-old schoolboy, Hector Pieterson, was shot dead that day – along with some 200 other Sowetan children.
A memorial has been erected in their memory and it was here, a few years ago, that another young Sowetan, Lebo Maleta, started selling souvenirs to young backpackers. In no time at all, he had converted his great-grandparents’ two-roomed house into Soweto’s very own backpackers’ hostel.
Lebo’s is a place to chill with local food, a bit of reggae and a spliff or two. People come and go, arriving off the bus from Maputo or getting a hired car to Swazi. Maria, from Finland, lives here with Lebo. The hostel idea took five years to develop, which Lebo’s father, an economist at the treasury, chided him about. “He said I was too slow,” says Lebo, though doing it his way has paid off. Unhampered by the fact that he didn’t have any bikes, he started offering bike tours: “We borrowed when we needed. The next year we bought three and now we have 25,” he says.
I do a tour of a shebeen where the patrons, toothless and tattered, give a ragged rendering of their national anthem. A tin of the locally brewed sorghum beer is passed round. Umqobothi it’s called but it’s not my cup of tea.
Then it’s on to the home of our guide, whose Zulu grandfather had been a miner. Eight men lived here, their beds a narrow space on the cold cement floor where they slept in rows until it was time to go to work.
In later years, there were the men who rolled home on pay-day dead drunk, aiming to get inside before the huge concentration-camp lights were switched on, signalling the start of the 6pm curfew. Desperate for shelter, they would bang on doors which, from fear, were rarely opened. Finally, the authorities allowed people to erect walls around their dwellings, which became known as the stop-nonsense walls.
Joe Slovo’s post-apartheid plan to build one million homes has yet to be fully realised here. Buildings are going up, but slowly. The brown envelope culture is at work, though poor management is a contributory cause, which is why the communal wash house, from the bad old days, is still in use, as are the communal lavatories: three grim pedestals in a row,
no seats.
But Lebo and his team – the guides, the bike engineers, the gardener and the kitchen staff – have a quiet take on their parents’ era. That was how it was then, they say, this is how it is now. Soweto, after all, is a major satellite city 15km from Johannesburg, with a population of some three million and home to the country’s biggest shopping mall. It’s safer here, they say, than in Johannesburg.
Soweto was also home to many of the big names in the ANC. When I first visited the former Mandela home and was reading some of Nelson Mandela’s letters from prison displayed there, a door opened and Winnie entered, resplendent in a brilliant peacock blue dress. “Would you like to be photographed with me?” she asked and the arm which she put around me as we posed together clasped my shoulder like a vice.
South Africa’s other important date, July 18th, was introduced in 2009 when Zuma exhorted people to spend 67 minutes on that day giving a hand to someone less fortunate. The 67 minutes
are a reflection of the 67 years in which Mandela was actively engaged in politics. It
seemed only right, therefore, that outside the Mandela house there should be an enterprising Sowetan selling small
phials of sand which, he assured me, came from the Mandela garden.
Yes, reader, I bought it. As an observer during the first democratic elections here, I have my own memories of it all.
“But what do you remember,” I ask my guide, Thabo. “I was only four,” he says, “but I remember being carried to the polling station on my mother’s back in a blanket.”
And then he asks me about it all and I tell him about the first sitting of the new parliament: Joe Slovo in his red socks; Ronnie Kasrils, bad-boy darling of MK supporters, playing to the gallery; Winnie and Mandela seated far apart; De Klerk writing with his left hand. To Thabo, that’s all history. Though Hector Pieterson isn’t.
www.sowetobackpackers.com