Soweto travel guide

It’s recommended you only visit Soweto on a guided tour.

The most popular excursion from Johannesburg is to the (in)famous township of Soweto, lying 13 km southwest of Johannesburg city centre. Soweto has mushroomed into a city in its own right, it covers 135 sq km and is home to around one million people. Short for South West Township, people first moved here in 1904 from Sophiatown where there was an outbreak of plague. The township increased in size dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s when black peoples were forced to relocate from the city centre into designated areas outside the city. Since then, the population has soared, bolstered by immigrants from rural areas, as well as from Nigeria, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and other African countries.

Despite its reputation, Soweto feels remarkably ordinary. Large areas are given over to tidy rows of affluent suburban houses. Like in any other South African city, there are districts and suburbs and shopping centres. The streets are well maintained, there are banks and golf courses and the giant FNB Soccer City, which has undergone an overhaul for the 2010 World Cup. Yellow commuter trains trundle to Johannesburg and Mercedes cruise between smart homes with well-tended gardens and satellite dishes. Soweto allegedly has the highest concentration of millionaires in the country and one of the most successful BMW dealerships, and in 2007, one of Johannesburg’s largest shopping malls, Maponya Mall, opened on Old Potchefstroom Road. The flip-side however, much like in any other city in the country, is that there are also still areas of squatter camps and informal housing, where unemployment is as high as 90% and people have to share amenities like taps and toilets. The government is constantly trying to improve the situation by building two-room rudimentary houses to replace the shacks, but efforts are hampered by the thousands of people who flood into Soweto every month, fleeing rural poverty and desperate for jobs.

Most tours of Soweto take in a handful of important historical sites. The Soweto Tourism Information office (STIC) (T011-945 3111, http://www.sowetotourism.com) is located in the Walter Sisulu Square of Independence (http://www.waltersisulusquare.co.za) in Kliptown. This square is at the site where the Freedom Charter, calling for equality for all, was presented by the ANC to a mass gathering of people in 1955. The square, which used to be called Freedom Square, was renamed after one of the delegates, Walter Sisulu, when he died in 2003. The authorities broke up the illegal gathering but the charter was adopted as a guiding document, and it remains the cornerstone of ANC policy to this day and is seen by many as the foundation of South Africa’s 1996 Constitution. Back in 1955 it was just a dusty patch of land, but since 2003 it has been redeveloped as a tourist attraction and is now an attractive paved square housing a number of monuments. These include the 10 Pillars of the Freedom Charter; 10 giant slabs of concrete representing the clauses of the Freedom Charter, and the red-brick conical Freedom Charter Monument.

The Baragwanath Hospital, which claims to be the largest hospital in the world, with over 5000 beds and 20,000 employees is usually the first sight to be pointed out on a tour of Soweto. It is estimated that half of Soweto’s residents were born here and it also attracts unfortunate attention for its large proportion of AIDS patients and victims of street violence. All tours take in the excellent Hector Pieterson Museum (Khumalo and Pela streets, Orlando West, T011-536 2253, Mon-Sat 1000-1700, Sun 1000-1600, R15, children under 16 R5). This modern museum stands two blocks away from where 13-year-old Hector Pierterson was shot dead by riot police during a school demonstration on 16 June 1976. The children had been demonstrating about the use of Afrikaans as the dominant language in education, before the police opened fire and killed more than 170 students. This event, captured on camera in an image that shocked the world, sparked the final 10-year battle against Apartheid causing townships across the country to rise up in bitter revolt. (The incident is now known as the Soweto Uprising and the 16 June is a public holiday, Youth Day.) Outside the museum is a memorial to Hector, marked by the iconic image of his body being carried by a friend with Hector’s wailing 17-year-old sister running alongside. The photograph was taken by journalist Sam Nzima who said at the time, “I saw a child fall down. Under a shower of bullets I rushed forward and went for the picture. It had been a peaceful march, the children were told to disperse, they started singing Nkosi Sikelele. The police were ordered to shoot." Nkosi Sikelele is now South Africa’s National Anthem. The inscription on the monument reads ‘To honour the youth who gave their lives in the struggle for democracy and freedom’. Each slab of slate in it represents a child that died needlessly on that fateful day and the water feature is symbolic of children’s tears. Inside, this incredibly moving and powerful museum is similar to the Apartheid Museum, in that it uses multimedia exhibits, films, newspapers, personal accounts and photographs to piece together what happened on and around that date. One of the tour guides is Antoinette Sithole – Hector’s sister who was in the photograph. There is an excellent museum bookshop with dozens of interesting books on South Africa.

Mandela House Museum (8115 Vilakazi St, Orlando West, T011-936 7754, http://www.mandelahouse.co.za, Mon-Sat 0930-1700, R60, South African residents R40, children (under 16) R20) is a short walk from the Hector Pieterson Museum. It is Nelson Mandela’s house, where he lived before he was incarcerated. He moved into the diminutive three-roomed house in 1946 with his first wife, Evelyn Mase, and in 1958 brought his second wife, Winnie, to live with him. Mandela insisted on moving back to the house on his release from prison in 1990. He said in Long Walk to Freedom: “It was only then that I knew in my heart that I had left prison.” But eventually its small size and the difficulty of keeping it secure put too much of a strain on him and he moved out of the township to a larger house in Houghton. It was opened as a museum by Winnie in 1997 and for many years displayed an odd collection of Mandela’s personal effects like his shoes and his furry bedspread, but it’s now in the hands of the Soweto Heritage Trust who refurbished it in 2008. It has now been transformed into what it would have looked like in the 1950s – bare concrete floors and a corrugated tin roof and it displays information about his time in the house. There’s also a visitor’s centre. Further down the road is the home of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, hidden behind high walls. Vilakazi Street is the only street in the world to have been home to two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

Also worth visiting is Regina Mundi, to the southwest, off Potchesfstroom Street, the largest church in Soweto, and an important site of demonstrations in the 1980s. You can still see bullet holes in the ceiling, a lasting testament to shots fired by police. Old photos of government attacks are pasted outside, and, if you’re lucky, you’ll catch the choir practising inside.

Finally, Soweto’s newest attractions are, oddly, the two 100-m-high Orlando cooling towers off Old Potchefstroom Road. They have long been a landmark and are part of a now-disused power station that was built in the 1950s to provide central Johannesburg with electricity (even though Soweto didn’t get electricity until 1986). In 2003, the First National Bank (FNB) sponsored the painting of the towers. One is painted in the FNB’s logo with ‘How can we help?’ on one side and ‘Proudly South African’ on another, and the second tower is painted in a fantastic vivid mural of life in Soweto, with cartoon characters of musicians, children playing, a woman selling her wares on a stall, minibus taxis, a metrorail train, and of course a figure of a smiling and waving Nelson Mandela in one of his trademark African print shirts. The area around the cooling towers is now earmarked for development for housing, and the power station itself is to become a retail and entertainment centre in the future. For now, the real reason to come to the cooling towers is Orlando Towers Adventure Centre, which opened mid-2008. They have built a lift on one of the towers, a viewing platform on top and now offer bungee jumping and swings inside (a world first), power swings and zip liners run between the towers....read more