A road sign welcoming people to Soweto at the entrance to South Africa’s largest municipality, SOWETO.
- Soweto, one of the apartheid battlegrounds, is a hive of activity that attracts curious tourists.
- Over a century of plundering the land for gold has left a strange but compelling legacy in Soweto.
- But nearly 30 years after the advent of democracy, the township is still plagued by ills, ranging from poverty and unemployment to substance abuse and crime.
- For more financial news, go to News24 Business Cover.
Soweto is full of gritty streetscapes and alleyways that evoke its history as one of the apartheid battlegrounds. However, there is also a friendlier side to the vast borough of Johannesburg, and one that local businessmen show curious tourists.
Every Sunday morning, Masike Lebele takes around 20 hikers for a walk through his childhood neighborhood, opening their eyes to a landscape where countryside, abandoned gold mines and deeply held popular beliefs coexist.
“This was my playground,” said Lebele, a wiry 40-year-old wearing a leopard-print shirt and floppy hat.
“I was adventurous when I was a kid,” he said, with sharp eyes and a smile.
“We used to be little hunter-gatherers here,” he said, pointing to a dam next to an abandoned gold mine. Here we learned to swim.
The starting point of your walk is a “shebeen”, a local tavern set up in a house that belonged to your grandmother.
A recent walk on the four-and-a-half-kilometer route started early in the morning. For safety, a dozen friends accompanied the group. The walkers crossed a street littered with trash and old tires, where vendors selling fresh fruit and snacks had set up their stalls.
“This is where Soweto begins,” said Lufuno Matidza, the guide’s stylish companion, who wears futuristic glasses, large earrings and bright pink lipstick.
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In the distance rose the silhouette of the skyscrapers of Johannesburg, another world. A reed-strewn moor sloped down to a stream.
“Sangomas,” a Zulu word for traditional healers, “consider this first part a holy land,” Masike said, asking the hikers to speak quietly.
‘Untold Stories of Soweto’
A naked man sat silently in the stream and six others in robes sang melodies. A little further on, three women wrapped in shawls had lit colored candles, which were melting on a rock.
The silence was broken by a scream. “What’s that?” asked an anxious walker.
“He is a person who roars, reaching out to the ancestors,” Matidza replied laconically, without stopping his pace.
The road meandered through a mound of gold-colored mine waste, sometimes streaked with a chemical blue color. Over a century of plundering the land for gold has left a strange but compelling legacy in Soweto.
Contamination of mine dumps is common and erosion has created spectacular but brittle unstable galleries of compacted sand.
“The gold is always here,” said Lebele, who said he was deeply attached to the seemingly desolate landscape.
At the exit of the ocher galleries there was a plateau of yellow sand.
“This is where we became kung fu masters. Every group we came across we fought,” recalled the tattooed Lebele.
The heights of the dumped rubble offer a spectacular view of Soweto, divided by streets into grids of small houses.
“This is our house,” Matidza said.
As the birthplace of apartheid, Soweto supports a thriving tourism industry, complete with museum tours, shebeens and a street where two Nobel winners, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, used to live.
But nearly 30 years after the advent of democracy, the township is plagued by ills, ranging from poverty and unemployment to substance abuse and crime.
Christo Welgemoed, 62, who lives just 11 kilometers from Soweto, said the walk opened up his horizons.
“If I hadn’t heard about this walk in a local publication, I would never have come here,” he told AFP.
“Usually we go to nature, streams, mountains, etc., (but) this is more of a cultural experience than normal.”
Noreen Wahome, 29, a Kenyan living in Johannesburg, said she came on the walk because of her love of “untold stories from Soweto.”
Lebele said his Soweto Ndofaya Walk was booked weeks in advance.
“People think mine dumps are a dangerous place, but…these are places of fun and exploration,” he said.
