On Tuesday 10 July 2018 Fabian and I joined a tour group which advertised trips to Soweto. The tour included a drive around Soweto and and explanation but what I really wanted was the walking tour of the place that was a slum, or shanty town, ghetto, or favela.
Soweto has a long history but the recent history is that the rich white colonists forced the poor black locals to live there. Nowadays Soweto has comfortable upper class neighborhoods, a middle class area, a government housing project area where lower income people can live comfortably, then the outright slums where for decades people have lived without legal standing, land rights, access to utilities, and in unstable conditions. The guide said that the government housing projects were for households which earn less than 2500 rand a month, which is about $USD 180 a month when minimum wage in the US is $7.50-15/hour.
In this slum area people can have dignity but everyone there is in poverty conditions. By “poverty” I mean that typical people have great challenges in maintaining a lifestyle which leads to a job and self-sustaining, healthy existence. I wish that every government in every place could promise people a bed, food,education and training, medical care, transportation, social and entertainment opportunities, and opportunity to work and contribute productively. Our tour guide said that Soweto has a 70% unemployment rate. I am not aware of any reason to believe that the poverty situation will change in the next generation.
After driving around and showing us various neighborhoods and local points of interest our tour guide brought us to the edge of a slum for a 30-minute walking tour. The guide in the car introduced us to a guide who lived in the slum area. This guide told us that the slum is a safe area and that he was local to the neighborhood we would tour and that all the local people welcome us here. Obviously this person was primed to address the questions we as Western tourists had. At the beginning of our walk he said that local people might call us “aballoo“, which he said was the local word for “white people”. Some way into the tour we visited a daycare center. It was a small playground and a shed. Parents with jobs could pay to send their children here while they worked. When we approached the children were familiar with foreign visitors, and all begin chanting “Aballoo! Aballoo!“. When I heard this I thought about why I was there, and I thought of Wikipedia, and I contemplated the extent to which the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the developing world was like a group of affluent white people on holiday standing in front of poor black kids who cheered, “White people!” When I was in India I saw a lot of really clueless foreign organizations having weird and ineffective charity and development outreach in India. I suppose I am part of that. I always wish to distance myself from enacting that fate too fully.
At the end of the tour we ended at a gift shop on the edge of the community near our van at the road. Its proprietors were two young men and the shop was called the Stoned Harbor. Maybe they were stoners or maybe the name meant anything else. These boys spoke English and had street sense about tourists. They were selling mostly the same tourist goods that every other tourist vendor sold. Like the other vendors they claimed to make everything themselves or that their family made the goods which seemed workshop or mass produced. I asked them how often tour groups came. One of them confided in me that it was sporadic, and that they depended on the tour company we booked, and that they wished for more tourism. For me as a tourist it was obvious that lots of people would pay them directly for tours of the slum if they could advertise and sell it. However, for this community, things like setting up a web presence, maintaining communication, processing payment, and managing a business are high barriers to entry. For now they seem boxed into the informal business sector of taking what the tour company as a middleman pays them. When I met the local boys I marveled – how do they learn English, why are they so savvy about Western tourist culture, how do they get to this point in life but not have access to Internet, and when and what social conditions will change to empower local people like this to run their own tourism without being dependent on the business from another community. I do not fault the tour company – they offer a Soweto experience which the Soweto people themselves are unable to sell. Fabian bought all his trip’s souvenirs from their little shop.
At the edge of the slum there was a large factory of some sort in a nice building with nice roads and seemingly whatever capital investment is required to have a workshop using labor. There was a large group of people on the street in front of the building. We asked the driver who said that the local people were protesting in a labor dispute. He said that normally they would drive that direction but for safety reasons, suggesting that the crowd was dangerous, he said that we would go another direction. When I was younger and had more time I used to go talk to protesters. Apparently now I literally pay for the privilege of being a passive observer to slum life, children celebrating my race, young men scamming me at gift shops to the extent of their imaginations for an amount of money which does not matter at all to me, and the grief of laborers. When I see these things the extent of my intelligence is to wish that poverty could be eliminated and to guess that Wikimedia projects, or open knowledge projects in general, are the best use of my time to seek the solution to eliminate poverty.
After the slum we went to the Hector Pieterson Museum. The museum tells the story of the 1970s Soweto uprising. The situation was that in South Africa colonial white people oppressed black people in apartheid. One narrative in the tension was that colonial British people and colonial Dutch people had competed for power and influence with each other more than they ever competed with the indigenous people, who were marginal in the governance narrative until recently.
In writing about the Voortrekker Monument I said that the Dutch built it in 1930 to celebrate the benefits of colonialism in South Africa. Continuing that narrative, the direct cause of the Soweto uprising was Dutch attempts to use South African tax money to have schoolchildren learn Dutch language at the cost of not having English language education. I had heard of the Soweto uprising before but knew little about it. Mistakenly I had thought that it was a protest against colonial languages, meaning that I thought that the people wanted to have schools in their mothertongues. This was not the case – the people were protesting to have school in English and not Dutch or Afrikaans.
The tension exploded in 1976 when students, most under age 18, demonstrated around Johannesburg by walking in public places near their schools. The Dutch had influence over the police force and ordered that the police shoot and kill about 700 children the first day and whatever other children they could find the week after. In addition to the dead 1000 more had injuries. The Dutch killed more children at will in the following weeks.
Hector Pieterson was a 13-year-old boy who had the distinction of having his corpse photographed while being carried away from the massacre by a neighbor as his sister walked beside him crying. Were it not for this photograph then perhaps there would be no memory of any of the 1000 others or the event even happening. The photograph made international media and still is the primary communication vehicle for telling the story. The Hector Pieterson Museum narrates the circumstances leading to the massacre, the massacre itself, and the outcome of the massacre. The museum is located in a place which allows guides to point in directions and to places which feature in the story of the massacre.
The feel of the museum is that it seeks to make heroes of anyone who resisted apartheid, oppression, colonial manipulation, and any barrier to the autonomy of the local people. The museum seemed to only include permanent exhibits and not have any changing collection, which to me makes it seem underfunded to be effective for regular outreach to the local community. The exhibits in the museum are only in English language.
Although it is a “museum”, the design of its exhibits have no focus around objects, any special collection, or proprietary holdings. As a wiki person I could imagine anyone replicating exhibits of the sort that this museum holds by putting text and image reproductions on the walls of any rooms anywhere. I enjoyed visiting and I like the idea of walking through a space to consume media which teaches something. If this museum had funding to build special collections – interviews, oral histories, archives, photo collections, research, and whatever else is necessary to preserve the memory and tell the story – then although I saw some evidence that some of these things happened at times in the past I saw no evidence that the stories of the people who experienced the massacre were preserved well enough to understand the extent of the damage. I suspect that many families whose children were killed never had anyone offer to record their stories in the archive.
The Hector Pieterson Museum itself communicates less ill-will toward the Dutch than I would imagine. It talks about some protests, and there are descriptions of how the students did not want to learn Dutch in school, but overall the tone of the exhibits is a lot more accepting of colonialism than I would imagine a narrative of this sort to be. For people who managed to establish a museum and tell their own story, if this museum reflects their feelings then they seem to be rather accepting of the colonial experience, the massacre, and everything else and simply ready to move on recognizing the present social order as normal just so long as the colonial grip in the future avoids more massacres and grants a little more autonomy. The museum does not, for example, demand reparations. I am not sure if that is because no one ever wanted them, or because the people do not ask in this venue for their own cultural reasons, or if it is because the museum organizers were unable to secure Dutch permission to raise this topic.
I feel a little bewildered. I am not sure what I all I saw, or the extent to which I read enough, or if I understood any of it correctly.