A weekend in Soweto

By Donna Bryson

Associated Press writer

updated 6:09 p.m. ET June 17, 2009

JOHANNESBURG - Southern African home cooking sounds comforting: samp, a chunky corn concoction; pap, a filling porridge; mogodu, boiled tripe.

OK, the last sounded better before the translation. But my husband and even my 5-year-old daughter are more adventurous eaters than I am. We all find something tempting at the buffet at Sakhumzi, and the popular restaurant is a welcome stop at the end of a drizzly day spent exploring Soweto, with stops at the former home of Nelson Mandela and an anti-apartheid protest museum and an overnight at a homey B&B.

We'd started that morning driving through the rows of mine dumps — low ziggurats a tapped-out shade of yellow — that isolate Soweto from the rest of Johannesburg. We entered the famed township on the Soweto Highway, past neat new homes, and headed to our bed-and-breakfast in Soweto's Orlando West neighborhood.

Soon our hostess Nthateng Motaung, who grew up in the home she's converted to accommodate up to eight guests, was cheerfully ushering us out her door on foot. She said we'd find the neighbors friendly and that the reports we'd heard about street crime in Soweto were greatly exaggerated.

We live closer to central Johannesburg, in an area once reserved for whites, where high security walls and few sidewalks create a pedestrian no-go zone. But Soweto was established in the 1930s as a dormitory for Johannesburg's maids, gardeners and miners, blacks who apartheid's engineers never dreamed would own cars.

The majority of black South Africans remain poor 15 years after the end of white rule, and Soweto has few cars relative to its population, estimated at just over 1 million — four of 10 Johannesburg residents are Sowetans. Narrow streets off main roads remain pedestrian thoroughfares, and sidewalks are being repaved at every turn.

Less than a block from Nthateng Bed & Breakfast we found No. 8115, one of Nelson Mandela's first homes in Johannesburg. Mandela long since moved to a leafier, once all-white neighborhood. His old four-room Soweto cottage is a museum.

Mandela moved in a year after the house was built in 1945, with his first wife. His second wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and their two daughters later lived there for decades, mostly on their own, while the anti-apartheid hero was on the run or in prison.

"The house itself was identical to hundreds of others built on postage-stamp-size plots on dirt roads," Mandela wrote in his autobiography. "It had the same standard tin roof, the same cement floor, a narrow kitchen, and a bucket toilet at the back."

If you go Visiting Soweto: Jimmy's Face to Face Tours or Soweto Funk Tours can arrange a night in Soweto. Accommodations: Nthateng Bed & Breakfast 6991 Inhlwathi St., charges 285 South African rand or about $35 per night (children are boarded free but charged for breakfast). Government-graded accommodation in Soweto. Food: Lunch at Nambitha, 6877 Vilakazi St., Orlando West, was about 240 rand or $30, as was a dinner for three at Sakhumzi, 6980 Vilakazi St., that included a bottle of South African rose. Attractions: Mandela House, 8115 Vilakazi, admission 60 rand or $7.35 (children under 6, 5 rand or 60 cents). Hector Pieterson Museum, 8288 Maseko St., 15 rand or about $1.85(children free). Mutwa's sculpture garden and Thokoza Park free.

Today, Soweto has some solid, middle-class houses — or mansions like Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's a few blocks from No. 8115. Many Sowetans still call the original match boxes home. The day we visited Mandela's house, we spotted a neighbor headed to a backyard toilet, roll of paper in hand.

Our B&B had indoor bathrooms, satellite TV, and a dining room where a breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage, cereal and too much more is served on a white table cloth.

Mandela's house was reopened to the public in March after months of restoration that preserved the bullet holes and scorched bricks that testify to its place in South Africa's violent history. Mementoes like a pair of army boots Winnie Madikizela-Mandela once wore, and multimedia narration give a sense of the country's past and its hopes for the future.

Enlarged photos show Winnie Madikizela-Mandela ironing in the house one day, another of her being bundled into a police car parked outside. Enter a room, and it is filled with recordings of news accounts of Soweto riots. Press a button mounted on a panel outside, and hear Winnie Madikizela-Mandela describing burying the umbilical cords of her children and grandchildren under a tree that still stands in the cramped yard, bringing to the city a rural tradition that tied new generations to their ancestors and their land.

First-person history is used with equally poignant effect at another museum just up the hill. This one is dedicated to the 1976 Soweto uprising and overlooks the site where 13-year-old Hector Pieterson was shot and killed by police during the unrest. A photograph of a dying Pieterson carried in the arms of another young protester remains a symbol of apartheid's brutality.

The modern brick and glass Hector Pieterson museum built in 2002 pays tribute to all the victims of 1976, and chronicles with verve and humanity young people's involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle.

The '76 protests are often attributed to student anger over being taught in Afrikaans, the language of Dutch colonizers and their descendants. But the museum showcases interviews that make clear young blacks were rising up against much more — a system that treated them as inferior.

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