We took a tour of Johannesburg today. A nice young man in a crisp black wardrobe and a simple gold chain picked us up at our hotel. We climbed into his car and we did the initial small talk of names and nations and how long you’ve been here. He said he was going to show us the good, the bad, and the ugly of Johannesburg. He did just that.
We started with Nelson Mandela Square, near our hotel in Sandton. It’s a shopping center, named in his honor in 2004. It is one of the largest on the continent. It felt like a shopping center, but there’s a giant statue. He’s dancing.
The statue was installed to mark the 10th anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic elections, and the first one honoring Mandela. It weighs some 5,000 pounds, considerably more than the miniature that is located nearby for the seeing impaired.
Along the ground in the square are short quotes of things that Mandela wrote, or said over the years. I took photos of a few of those, of course.
We made a quick stop at the overlook on Munro Drive. We’d done the same last night, but it’s worth seeing earlier in the day. Click to embiggen.
Munro Drive is a road that connects two suburbs (you’re looking on the northern suburbs here) and has a short punchy climb, a U-bend and slices through quartz to connect the neighborhoods. It is named after John Munro, director of Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company. And, somehow, just from the name, you feel like there could be a problem there. You could be right, JCI was a huge 19th century South African company invested in the mining, property and engineering sectors. As we learned from our guide, who called us “My good people,” all day, the land here is rich in everything mineral. We drove by exhausted mines were people are still descending, as trespassers, looking for gold and various other things. We saw them do it. And they’re not doing it if they’re coming up empty. The story of South Africa is one of great riches, and of horrible exploitation. At a macro level, we might be aware of that. But at the JCI level, there were always allegations. The one that helped bring them down was an investigation which seemed to point to almost a half billion dollars (American) worth of fraud. Oh, and also murder.
We drove along the way from here to there to what they tell the Americans is the Beverly Hills of Johannesburg. It’s neighborhoods of high walls obscuring what might be well manicured lawns. Some, our guide told us, were lived in. Others have become generational B&Bs. Others mostly abandoned, and squatters have taken up residence. We drove them some of this yesterday, too, and all you can see are the walls.
Then we dove into some of the recent history of South Africa. “Welcome, my good people, to Constitution Hill.” I do not know how many places in the world have put its aspirations right next to its horrors, but they have done so here. This was originally a fort and repurposed as a prison in 1892. Boer military leaders were housed here. It was a prison for white men. And then, during apartheid, it became a detention center for political prisoners, strikers, anyone “anti-establishment.” Mahatma Gandhi was imprisoned here, as was Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, and others. The site housed prisoners until 1983, when it was closed. We toured the infamous Number Four.
This room was designed to keep 50 prisoners. At times, it held many more. The museum docent talked pointed out there were no windows, told us about the two blankets prisoners received, and the hierarchy within the cell. The cell boss usually got those blankets. There were 16 people in this room when we were there, just enough people to allow you the sense of a fetid crush of humanity you might experience in larger numbers.
When you leave the communal quarters you go into another room which is dominated by this large sign hanging on the far wall.
Along the side walls are smaller signs, one each for the men photographed above. Each sign shares their name, the time of their incarceration, and why they were held here. And, in this way, the museum asks you to make decisions for yourself. Not all of these men were held here for the same reasons, but you bring your same sensibilities, or your own nation’s laws, or your hopes for modernity, with you to each. It is hard for most people to think someone violating a Pass Law should be held in such conditions. It is hard for many, including most Americans, to think there should be such a thing as a Pass Law to begin with.
Pass laws served as an internal passport system designed to racially segregate the population, restrict movement of individuals, and allocate low-wage migrant labor. Also known as the natives’ law, these laws severely restricted the movements of Black South Africans, Indian South Africans and Cape Coloureds by confining them to designated areas. Initially applied to Indigenous African men, attempts to enforce pass laws on women between the 1910s and 1950s sparked significant protests. Pass laws remained a key aspect of the country’s apartheid system until their effective termination in 1986.
For more than 200 years people lived under these rules. Authorities would stop people on the street. And if, like one or two of the men in the large photo above you didn’t have your pass on you, you were sent here. In March of 1960 Nelson Mandela famously burned his pass book in protest after police massacred 69 people protesting the dompas laws. It is easy, in retrospect, to say these things that were so unsavory they don’t exist anymore shouldn’t be something that brings a person to a place like this. Not everyone was held here for the same reasons, and something like 80 percent of the people who were here found themselves here simply because of the color of their skin. It is a lesson of history screaming at us about our future.
And the conditions were brutal. There was a limited, segregated diet, poor medical facilities, one shower a week, no privacy, public humiliation, with prisoners being hired out as cheap labor, and it’s all just as grim as you can possibly imagine, but you’re only getting a quick glimpse.
Mahatma Gandhi came to South Africa, as a young man, to practice a little law. When the case he was originally here for wrapped up he was preparing to return home, but had a change of heart. He wound up spending 21 years in the country, and it was here that he shaped his politics and and his personal ethics, his notion of Satyagraha (a devotion to truth) and the nonviolent protest concepts that come as a defense of dignity and personal autonomy. He was also imprisoned here, in 1906. His is one of the headshots above. And in one room, there are a few displays that talk more about the pass books, and Gandhi’s time here. Also, there’s this typewriter. You’re meant to think that this was in his office. You could infer that he typed upon it. But it’s just sitting on a table in an open air room and I doubt that.
We’re skipping over the shower and toilet facilities. They were limited and almost as humiliating as the personal inspections required when prisoners came back in from their work. All of it was designed to rob a person of their dignity, to remind them of their place, and to make those in power feel a bit better about themselves.
Nelson Mandela, who once stood in the places I stood today, and suffered in the places where I merely felt eerie, famously channeled a Dostoyevsky and said “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”
He was most assuredly thinking of political prisoners when he said that. He was surely thinking about this place.
He stood here, a short walk from the open air plumbing, where there is today an accessibility ramp, but probably three or four steps when this was a prison. He might have been brought down those steps. He might have looked up into the blue or grey sky. This is where prisoners were held in solitary confinement. They had a barbed wire ceiling.
This is one of the rooms where people were held in solitary. The signage explains that there were rules about how long a person could be kept there. The signage also explains that that rule was often ignored.
Here’s a row of those solitary confinement rooms. They go the other direction, as well. I counted 27 of them. One, it was explained, was where they brought people to torture them. In there, people were tortured to death. To stand there, alone, in the quiet. To consider that.
I do not know how many places in the world have put its aspirations right next to its horrors, but they have done so here. Just 450 feet from there sits the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the high court of the land. Established into law in 1993, it the constitutional court held its first session in 1995. The 11 judges have presided here since moving to this complex in 2004.
That photo is from the humble press area. It’s a tiny brick balcony with a few chairs and folding tables. From here the media look down upon all of the issues that the court care to hear. Everything — from the way the light comes into the room, to the hides before the judges, to the orientation of all of the seats, to those windows behind the judges, where the jurists can see the feet of the people they serve — everything you can see from here is steeped in ritual symbolism.
And the exterior walls are made up of the bricks that were a part of the prison.
We left Constitution Hill and did a quick drive by the Calabash. FNB Stadium is primarily for soccer and rugby. It has hosted other big events, like Mandela’s first speech after his prison release in 1990, the 2010 World Cup, and Mandela’s last public appearance. They can put 94,000 people in there for a match, more for concerts.
The design is meant to be evocative of an African pot, hence the nickname, the calabash. The exterior cladding mosaic of fire and earthen colors simulates fire underneath the pot. Inside, all of the views are accessible, and you’re never more than 100 yards from the action.
Then we drove into Soweto, and into the township there. “You are safe, my good people, because I am from there,” our guide said. We stopped to see what looks like a modern standard middle class neighborhood. We drove by some structures which, if I understood correctly, were former company town housing which is basically middle class, but not the way you’d think of it in America. And then we drove by the famous nuclear reactor cooling towers, which are now a sought after advertising canvas. Just up the street we stopped in the dense cluster of structures that were barely-standing buildings. I didn’t take any photos here. This was one of the more exploitive aspects of the day, honestly, but also eye-opening. You can explore it on Google.
We walked through part of it, soberly, quietly. We met a few people that lived there. The only dog we saw all day followed us around. Each of these buildings is perhaps 80 square feet. There’s enough room for a small bed, a countertop, a kerosene stove and a short stack of pots and pans. The floors are dirt. The roofs are also that same tin. When it is cold, it is cold. When it is hot, it is hot. Today was an earlier winter day, but it was still hot. There’s communal running water, communal toilet facilities, a few stores, but probably not anything like you’re imagining.
Throughout the day we’ve been talking about the problems of Johannesburg. The biggest, we were told, is unemployment. Others include abandoned buildings, police corruption, immigration, and so on. Not everything is horrible, there are haves and have nots, there are people that work hard, and people that want more than what opportunity has offered them. If you are in a township, life can be rather hand-to-mouth. Part of the issue in this spot, we were told, is the need for housing. The government is in charge of that, apparently. People sit and wait for the government to get that done. How long can it take, how long could you be here? I asked.
A lifetime, our guide whispered.
We visited one of the Mandela’s former homes. I am standing in Nelson Mandela’s courtyard. He planted this tree.
It is a museum. There are many guests. We had a docent. It is an odd mixture of a living home, but a museum and somehow that makes it seem like it is neither of those things. Or perhaps the Mandela family stuffed their shelves and filled their walls with memorabilia. It is hard to know.
Our guide guess well about his good people. He took us a short drive from that Mandela museum to the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the site where the Soweto Uprising took place in 1976. All three of these places are within 1.3 miles of one another, and they all felt like they were worlds apart.
The street where the uprising began is a busy and bustling two-lane road. There’s an elaborate courtyard where the uprising took place. And then there is the museum. I didn’t take any photos there, for some reason. This is what happened.
In 1976, the government decided they would teach students Afrikaans. The teachers were apparently ill-equipped and untrained to teach the language. And this would have been the third or fourth language some of the students learned, but this one suddenly, and poorly put upon them. Students revolted. They got together, wrote a letter, and were prepared to march it from A to B to deliver their protests. But the police gathered and stood in their way. Eventually, a few shots rang out. One of the kids, a kid, that was killed was Hector Pieterson. He was 12 at the time. He was standing on the street corner on that June day in Soweto, waiting for his sister, so they could walk on home. A police officer squeezed off a round and, standing in that court yard you can see where the officer was, where Pieterson was, and stand on a brick line that marks the ballistic line of the round.
Another boy scooped up Pieterson and tried to hustle him to help. Pieterson’s sister arrived and ran along side him, wailing. A photographer took a photo of this, which was smuggled out of town and horrified the world. Pieterson was proclaimed, by the media, as the first to die. But another student, Hastings Ndlovu was the first murdered in the street by the police. All of this set off a days long massacre, which killed at least 176.
This we learned standing outside of the museum. Our guide walked us in, and into a courtyard, where we pumped into Hector Pieterson’s sister who, 50 years on, is still giving tours about the uprising and the death of her younger brother. (Their mom started this place, and she stayed on for years. Apparently, even after she finally retired she stopped by regularly to make sure things were going well.
In that inner-courtyard there are a bunch of markers, like you would find in a cemetery. On them, in small print, where the names and ages of people that were killed in the larger internal conflict. I’m not sure how much of this is supposed to be a part of the tour, but you know how I can be. I got our guide to tell his good people more than he was prepared to discuss. And if he has it right it sounds for all the world like they were just a bad handful of choices from being in a full on civil war.
Our guide let his guard down in front of his good people, and eventually realized just how much he was telling us. To be fair, I, being me, was pulling it out of him. It was a real and frank conversation, not at all official. I’m not clear if he works for a company or for himself, so I won’t say too much about it, other than to say I was glad for the talk and his perspective and trust. He sent us into the museum, which has a strict no-photographs policy. It’s a great museum, featuring life-sized photos, video and television from the period, plenty of signage and testimonials explaining almost everything else about the Soweto uprising and its aftermath. It’s a fantastic museum and a memorable way to end the day’s tour. Our good guide gave us a tremendous experience.
We had a fine steak dinner at The Bull Run, the restaurant attached to our hotel. Tomorrow we’re getting up early. We’re going on safari.
