Jo'burg

It's a long way from northern Kruger to Jo'burg, so after the morning game drive, I had to lead-foot it to make it to the airport before dark. It was going so well before we got pulled over by the police doing 162kph. Now, apparently, there is no spot fine for this speed, so we would have to go the the police station and pay 1000 rand bail. After doing a U-turn across the dual-carriageway onto the grass mid section, the cop suggested that this was “very unfair to tourists”, and if we just paid him a “fee” of what we could afford, then we could be on our way. I handed over 800 rand (£70), which was probability too much, but still less than the bail. As it was, with the traffic around Pretoria, we were 90 minutes late to the airport, but so was our hostel pickup. With the end of a confederations cup match clogging the streets, it took nearly two hours to get to the hostel.

We had two days in Jo'burg before the start of the overland trip, and in that time we needed to get a grand or so in US$, take a tour of Soweto and watch a rugby match. Easy? No. None of the bureaux de chance at the mall would change rand for dollars - some wanted an airline ticket (they couldn't grasp the concept that we were leaving by land), while others simply didn't have dollars. So after a futile visit to the mall, we returned to the hostel to start the Jo'burg/Soweto tour.
















We started of in a rich walled compound suburb (Mandela has a house out here), before plugging into crime ridden Hillbrow; we'd been driven through here the night before, and it is defiantly a suburb that has seen better days – to walk around here alone, at any time of day, would be lunacy. From Jo'burg we headed out to the infamous Soweto (South Western Townships), a place that today is full of sharp contrasts. On the edge sit large houses with well maintained gardens, some of which boast swimming pools in the back – all the trappings of a middle-class life. At the end of the street the large rows of male dorms start; during apartheid, Jo'burg had an appetite for cheap labour from rural areas, but not the families of these men, so the workers were housed in sheds with no electricity or indoor plumbing. Most of the housing stock of Soweto consists of two room family houses, many of which have now been extended beyond all recognition. However, on the wasteland between the various townships, live the very poorest, in unofficial tin shed shanty towns.
















The 1976 Soweto uprising started out as a protest by school children about having Afrikaans forced on them as a means of instruction – it was seen as the language of the oppressor, and eliminated any chance of bright students going to English language universities either abroad or in South Africa. The protest culminated in the police firing live rounds at groups of students; the youngest to die was 13 year old Hector Pieterson – the excellent museum in his name tells the story of the uprising, and more generally of apartheid.
















The next day we needed to get back out to the airport to get dollars and transfer to a hotel of that the trip was departing from. The hostel provided a car, but not the minibus they had picked us up in. The car, a VW, was an early 1970s model that pumped out thick clouds of smoke. At one point the driver aborted turning down a street because there was a police check point - he explained to me that if the police stopped the car they would impound it. So to avoid the police, he weaved through the back streets of Hillbrow, as we prayed it wouldn't die on us. The fact I'm writing this means we did make it, just.