Image courtesy of eriktorner @ Creative Commons
It must have been around midday, but inside the modest living room it was reverently dim, and respectfully quiet, as if even light and sound knew to pay their respects. One by one, the members of our group shuffled into the room, and the guide began his tour by deliberately pointing to the bullet holes in the screen wall guarding the front door, right next to which I was standing. He explained how snipers of the former security police would line up on the low ridge above the house, and fire live rounds into the wall for target practice.
In the bedroom, we were shown the traditional dress that the man himself wore at his trial, neatly displayed at the foot of the bed. He was always immensely proud of his ancestral heritage, we were told, and of the man that it had helped him become. I stood staring at the bed for a few minutes after the rest of the group had filed out, at the feathery head dress and the white and blue kaross, trying to remember the photo I’d once seen of him wearing it. Suddenly the air was too thick, and too close, and the soundless restlessness rang deafeningly in my ears. I quickly found the exit, and slumped back against the red brick wall next to the back door of Nelson Mandela’s former family home in Orlando West, Soweto. A desperate lungful or two later, I began to look around for a well-known face, or at least a familiar voice. Even the light seemed strange, thin and shallow somehow. The early autumn breeze was sharp and dry, and not at all how I knew it. I assumed then that it was the oxygen-poor Highveld air making me light-headed and woozy, but I was wrong. It was simply the place. Some places alter you irrevocably, and no-one steps off Vilakazi Street the same person as they were before.
That first visit to Vilakazi was in 2001, with a group of fellow high school students gathered in Johannesburg for a youth leadership conference. It was ten years since Nelson Mandela had been set free from prison, seven years since his African National Congress won the first democratically contested elections in South Africa, and six years since he united a nation by appearing in the number six jersey when the Springboks won the Rugby World Cup. By 2001, the ideal of the Rainbow Nation had already taken shape. For the first time ever in South Africa everyone could vote, and choose to live where they want, with whomever they wanted. The country was, of course, free, but in most formerly ‘white’ neighbourhoods like Roodepoort and Rowallan Park, my working class neighbourhood in Port Elizabeth, precious little actual racial integration had taken place.
Not too long before, white primary school students were still cynically being taught how to react in case of a terrorist attack, how to tell a landmine from a hand grenade, and what an AK-47 assault rifle looked like. When the first black kid was enrolled at our school, it was an event, and a controversial one at that and in spite of the sacrifices made by people like Mandela and Desmond Tutu, different races still regarded one another with suspicion.
Soweto, the largest and most famous township in South Africa, was where black people lived, and it was supposed to be dirty, poor, and dangerous. It was just not a place where white people went, and for a 17-year old from Port Elizabeth it was, for all practical purposes, a different country. Being there was not something many of my age had yet experienced, and the thought of it had been terrifying, unnerving, and thrilling in equal measure.
Our group was on a tour of Soweto’s significant sites, including Mandela’s home on the only street in the world to produce two Nobel Prize winners. We’d come in by bus from the centre of Johannesburg, and Mandela House at number 8115 Vilakazi Street was our first stop.
The language of the township is noise, and colour. The honking horns and blaring kwaito music of the minibus taxis seemed to reverberate in the ground beneath your feet, with the scraping and banging of their doors constantly signalling the arrival and departure of a new load of passengers. Fruit vendors and amagwinya bakers whistled and shouted to attract the attention of potential customers. The sun yellows and bright reds of the first mobile networks had just begun appearing on billboards and the high, late-autumn sun had everything in stark, overexposed focus.
From the moment we stepped off the bus I was unbalanced, weight on the back foot, but not because I felt uncomfortable, or unsafe. Not because I was a white kid in school uniform in the middle of a township. It wasn’t the noise, or the colour, or the rush and rumble of people and activity. I was caught off-guard because Orlando West was so normal. I was too dumb then to realise that my expectations had simply been informed by my prejudiced notions, but I was still startled by just how pretty everything was. The streets were clean, organised in familiar suburban grids. The sidewalks were shaded by established jacarandas. The front yards were generally small, but all were neat, some even landscaped. Most looked more pleasant than many in my own neighbourhood back home. I’d been expecting to feel pity, but now I was jealous.
I was enraptured by the unexpected surroundings, but once the presentation began, it could not last. For the first time in my life, I was confronted with the asphyxiating realities of our South African past. So I bailed out. When the rest of the group filed out of the back door at the end of the interior half of the tour, I quietly slipped back into the last line. I was a bare few months out from matric exams, but my education had, on that day, barely begun.
Diagonally across Vilakazi Street from Mandela House sits Phefeni Secondary School, and next to it Orlando West High School: two plain-looking schools that you would not stop to notice if you weren’t told to. I’d heard of the Soweto Student Uprisings of 16 June 1976 before, which is to say that I knew they happened, and had the opaque impression that they were somehow historically significant. The guide took up a position on the edge of the sidewalk, with his back to the two facebrick buildings across the street. We crowded around him in a wide half-circle on the winter-brown lawn. He began with the historical context, about how Phefeni and Orlando West High had been part of the genesis of the boycott against Afrikaans as medium of instruction in black schools, of the central role those two schools played on that day, and how they were to serve as important staging points for the marches. Then he told us about Hector Pieterson, the Soweto student who was among the first to be shot when police opened fire with tear gas and live ammunition on the crowds of students gathered in the vicinity. Once again the township noise seemed to mute itself.
“Hector was shot right there, at that gate,” he told us, pointing with an outstretched left arm, “and then he tried to crawl to safety around the corner.” He paused, drew a sharp, audibly shallow breath, then continued.
‘’The police were firing rounds into the air, and into the crowd. Everywhere school kids were running, shouting, falling and scrambling. Hector’s sister Antoinette was looking around for him, because she lost him in the melee when the shots began ringing out, and her eyes were burning from the tear gas. Then she saw a young man running by, carrying the limp, lifeless body of a small boy in his arms. She recognised the boy as her brother by his school shoes. Frantically, she set off after them, eventually catching up with the young man. Confused, seeing the blood running from Hector’s mouth, she demanded to know from him what was going on, and where he was taking her brother. ‘Can’t you see he’s hurt?’ she shouted, breathlessly trying to keep up with him.”
‘‘But Mbuyisa Makhubo kept running, until a car came around a corner, and the stranger stopped to help. He placed Hector’s body in the back seat of the car, and looked up at Antoinette. Mbuyisa knew it was already too late.”
Seeing the bullet holes in the wall of the house knocked the wind out of me, but the story of thirteen year-old Hector Pietersen stunned me cold right where I stood. The air again felt thin, the sounds distant, the smells unfamiliar. Like nowhere else I’d ever been, the place I was standing in felt like holy ground. I was mere metres away from the precise spot at which one of the most frightfully horrific events in our country’s history took place. In that place, children younger than myself had sacrificed their lives, because they simply wanted to be educated in their own language.
Our guide spoke about the famous photo that journalist Sam Nzima took of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying Hector, with Antoinette running beside, and the impact it had in portraying the indiscriminate, indefensible brutality of the apartheid regime. I tried to recall the photo, knowing that I’d seen it before, but unable to remember where, or what it looked like precisely. The reality check on Vilakazi Street had made my recollection of everything I’d ever learnt or known about South Africa’s past very blurry.
Back on the bus, the schoolchild chatter continued vaguely around me, but my attention was fixed outside the windows. The late-afternoon light was fainter and thinner now, not as bright as it was before. Around Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, the shacks were stacked closely on top of each other, and the grey bank of smoke from a thousand paraffin stoves hung low and grim over their low corrugated-iron roofs. Dirty white and faded yellow plastic shopping bags were caught on the broken wire fences that surrounded most of the squatter camps. Here was Soweto as I’d heard it described: an ugly, foreboding warren of poverty and hopelessness stretching relentlessly over hectares of broken, eroded earth and grime. And not a school in sight.
Nine years after I first went to Johannesburg, in 2010, the world came to South Africa. It was the FIFA World Cup, and the country was shimmering with optimism over what the Rainbow Nation could finally, belatedly, achieve. Every single car had rear-view mirror socks in the pattern of the South African flag, as did mine, and I absolutely burst with patriotic pride when I first pulled on the Bafana Bafana supporter’s jersey that I’d bought from the hawker at the robot for about R250. It suspiciously looked, and unmistakeably smelled, previously worn, but it was nothing a couple of rounds in the washing machine and enough beers couldn’t mask, I argued, and I wore it most days.
Soccer had historically been the sport of the township, but not the suburb. The average white South African could possibly conjure the names of two local clubs at a push. That year however, you didn’t need to be an expert to be a fan, and at our flat of three twenty-something year old men, we suddenly, for the first time, knew who Ithumeleng Khune and Aaron Mokoena were. In the lead-up to the opening game against Mexico, Friday evenings at the flat were spent weighing the merits of starting Steven Pienaar ahead of Bernard Parker, and teaching each other the correct pronunciation of names like Letsholonyane and Dikgacoi as soon as the fire was lit. On the 11th of June 2010 we squeezed into the fan park that was a few minutes’ walk from our block of flats, along with tens of thousands of others, beaming in the sunshine yellow of our supporter’s kit and itchy clown-hair toupees. We spent most of the first half of the opening game bumping into other people, everyone bustling and jostling for a spot with a clear line of sight to the massive screen. The constant droning of the infamous plastic ‘vuvuzela’ trumpets was utterly deafening in the closed-roof stadium, but we hustled along with the throng, every now and then trying, and spectacularly failing, to produce a satisfyingly monotonous blare of our own. When, on 53 minutes, Teko Modise cleaved open the Mexican defence with a diagonal ball to a flying Siphiwe Tshabalala on the left, and the winger put his left foot through a lightning bolt across the flailing Mexican ‘keeper, we, along with 55 million other South Africans (most of whom were in that stadium, by the sounds of it) were cathartically delirious.
To the watching world, it was a well-worked, counter-attacking goal against a fractured defence, in a high-stakes game. To many South Africans, it was healing. After centuries of oppressive suffering, the hope glimmered, even if just for a precious, fleeting moment, that South Africans together could achieve great things.
Thirteen days earlier, as is so often the case in the country, but almost forgotten in the near-maniacal build-up to that epoch-making day, sport had provided the stage for another grand day, only this time it wasn’t soccer. The Super Rugby Final was played between the traditional South African rugby powerhouses: the Bulls from Pretoria, and the Stormers from Cape Town. Because Loftus Versveld, the famous home of the Bulls, was being used as a World Cup venue, the match was moved to the Orlando Stadium, there where the students were supposed to gather on the 16th of June, 1976. The move was hugely symbolic, but not universally acclaimed. Rugby, in spite of having deep roots and a celebrated history in black communities across the country, and having been seen by Nelson Mandela himself as such a useful vehicle for reconciliation, was still perceived to be an essentially white sport, and there were doubts in some camps about the feasibility of hosting a large rugby match in a township.
But in the midst of the ‘Ke Nako’ spirit of 2010, a thing happened on that day in Orlando. Soweto embraced the sport of rugby, and the match pulled a capacity crowd. Supporters descended upon the township in their droves, some flying from Cape Town, most arriving on busses and trains from the heavily-Afrikaans Pretoria, situated about sixty kilometres to the north.
The Bulls won, and after the game, the supporters of both the winning and losing teams flooded into the shebeens and chesa nyama’s of Vilakazi Street and Orlando West. Images circulated on social media of tables bending under the weight of empty Black Label and Castle quart bottles, with men in sky-blues jerseys and bullhorn skullcaps on their heads sharing drinks with grinning locals. The next morning, the Sunday papers carried the Bulls victory on the back page, and the heralding of rugby in Orlando on the front. Afrikaans had come back to Soweto, but this time it was offered a beer.
When the bristling euphoria around that Siphiwe Tshabalala thundergoal had finally settled, Bafana Bafana couldn’t sustain the momentum. They drew the opener with Mexico, lost badly to Uruguay five days later, and then beat a catastrophically mutinous French team in their final group game. For the first time ever, the host country couldn’t advance past the group stages, and when all was said and done, ‘Shabba’s score didn’t change a thing. The World Cup had made millionaires of a few construction-company CEO’s, but in the poorer parts of Soweto, within sight of the cavernous Soccer City stadium that hosted both the opener and final, the paraffin smoke still choked the air on the morning after Spain lifted the trophy. A few white boys from Pretoria in bullhorn skullcaps drinking Castle Lager quarts in a shebeen weren’t going to do it either, and neither was wearing a Bafana Bafana supporters jersey. On one particular day however, in a packed Bellville Velodrome and with the vuvuzelas taking 5 years off my hearing age, when a soccer ball hit the roof of a net I felt a familiar thrill. I’d felt it once before, on a dry-grass sidewalk in Soweto, 9 years earlier. This time it wasn’t in quiet reflection, but rather in a boisterous, raucous scream. The effect was the same though.
My second visit to Vilakazi Street came fifteen years after the first, in 2016. It was for work, only it wasn’t planned. I was ‘trawling’ the street for potential business like I was taught, driving by sight and not GPS, when a facebrick school building suddenly seemed faintly recognisable. As a reflex, I looked left. The sidewalk seemed different now, more manicured, and the palisade fence had been painted, but number 8115 was undoubtedly still there.
The tour busses parked outside the gate were bigger, and now they were carrying international tourists. The noise was mostly unmistakeable, but it was early spring, so the wintery browns and grays had been replaced by lush, vibrant greens. The jacarandas had grown, with their wide branches now casting wide, cool shadows on the sidewalk, and pink and purple blossoms on the street. Sakhumzi, the restaurant now famous for providing tourists and curious locals alike a taste of the township, first started trading as a humble shebeen and chesa nyama in that same year of my first visit, but the parking bays in front of its entrance were full, even if it was still only late afternoon. The fruit and amagwinya were still there, but now were being sold alongside wooden sculptures of giraffe and elephant, and trinkets and touristy Mandela memorabilia.
I wondered if the place had changed, and if it was for the better. It has seen the worst and the best of what South Africa can produce, and everything in between. Some of that bad has reverberated through the decades, and the change it wrought was violent, drastic and lasting. Sometimes, the good has been fleeting and ephemeral, a fanciful depiction of what a country can be, perhaps wants to be, maybe in spite of itself. Vilakazi didn’t seem to mind. Regardless of good or bad, it is always there, rarely far outside the frame. It’s played its part, and earned its right to be there, to be whatever it wants to be. To make the noise it wants, and to speak the language it wants.
Off The Ends 