South Africa Blooms at Site of Bloodshed 20 Years Ago

It is a sunny Saturday morning in South Africa’s best-known black community, and things are hopping at the Dobsonville Mall.

Long lines wait at the bank machines. Shoppers clog checkout counters at the supermarket, and families buy popcorn at the triplex cinema. Children with bright balloons celebrate a birthday in the steakhouse.

Isabel Mlambo, 17, hangs out near Frankie’s Pizza. “I’m meeting my friends,” she says, a look of teenage ennui on her face.

Over in Pimville, another part of Soweto, a road race winds by tennis courts behind a new library. Inside, parents and students fill nearly every cubicle and chair as toddlers play on the carpet.

“We’re busy every day,” head librarian Tsakane Shiburi says proudly.

And in Dube, still in Soweto, a waiter uncorks a bottle of chardonnay at Wandie’s Place. Five white customers mix with 30 or so black patrons. Business cards hang on a wall, imported beer is on ice, and jazz plays softly overhead.

“Soweto is a nice place now,” says Wandile Ndala, owner of Soweto’s first fern bar.

Soweto exploded onto front pages 20 years ago Sunday, when white police gunned down black schoolchildren, sparking nationwide riots that left about 700 people dead. The uprising was a turning point in the long battle to overturn apartheid that ended with democratic elections in 1994.

To outsiders, South Africa’s largest township came to symbolize poverty, repression and mob violence. But the image of a vast, teeming shantytown beside Johannesburg was never fair. Soweto was the nation’s most middle-class black community and a spiritual home for many black South Africans. And today it pulsates with activity.

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“Soweto is not a slum!” Sophie Masite, the newly elected black mayor of Soweto and downtown Johannesburg, said indignantly. “It’s a vibrant city. And it is changing very fast.”

The changes, due in part to government subsidies, go far beyond the first mall and yuppie bar. Garbage trucks now ply newly paved streets. Work crews have removed trash heaps from roadsides and cemeteries. Traffic lights, street lamps and stop signs have been erected. Sidewalks and storm sewers are being dug.

Several schools and clinics have been built, others refurbished. The Morris Issacson High School, cradle of the 1976 uprising, was a ruin three years ago, for example. Most windows were smashed, several classrooms had no roofs and the library had been burned. Students somehow attended school there anyhow.

The school was rebuilt last year with spacious classrooms, covered brick walkways, new desks and modern equipment. Not a single window is broken.

Conditions are similar at the newly built Hector Petersen Primary School, named for the 12-year-old boy killed by police on the first day of the Soweto uprising.

“Parents have taken ownership of schools now,” said principal V. T. Zengele. “They are involved. They built some of our furniture, and they put in the alarm. They come to our meetings. It makes a big difference.”

Train stations, once feared as sites of violence, have been renovated, complete with Disney-like turrets and spires. Cricket is suddenly popular, although a basketball league is growing fast.

Enos Mafokate, a former groom, has even started Soweto’s first riding academy. Each afternoon and weekend, two dozen children and teenagers practice show-jumping on donated horses and vie to compete in regional championships.

“They’re always in the winners’ ring,” Mafokate, 51, said proudly. “I want one of my children to become one of the top riders in the country.”

The housing backlog is still severe, but 1,700 bungalows are being built in Protea Glen, creating a pleasant, if crowded, suburb of red-brick houses with tile roofs, freshly sodded lawns and white lace curtains.

“It’s much nicer than my old home,” Tandi Mchunu, a nurse, said as she watered flowers outside the 4 1/2-room bungalow she bought last month with a government subsidy. Nearby, work crews hammered beams and rafters while clanking bulldozers dug new roads.

Those who don’t have decent homes at least have hope.

In Doornkop, a crowded shack settlement at Soweto’s western edge, community leaders sat on broken stools to explain how the government will subsidize the construction of 1,100 homes for squatters later this year--and 20,000 more over the next decade.

“We’re talking about helping the poorest of the poor, people who are jobless and destitute,” said Zweli Majova, an unemployed man who heads the local development forum. “We believe this project is going to be a yardstick to prove life has really changed.”

To be sure, much of Soweto remains poor, or at least much poorer than most of South Africa’s white communities, where swimming pools and lush parks are the rule. The windows of M. D. Brokers & Estates, for example, are filled with photos of traditional Soweto “matchbox” houses for sale. Most have outside toilets.

Horse-drawn carts still deliver coal to most homes, and a gray haze from countless fires chokes the air on cold winter days. The only BMW dealer has closed for lack of buyers. And Soweto’s first bookstore is struggling to make ends meet.

“There isn’t enough business,” said Solomon Sikakane, 69, sitting on a packing crate he was using for a chair in the sparsely stocked Imfundo/Thuto bookstore. “And the rent is very high.”

So is Soweto’s unemployment--above 40%. Schools are in such short supply that many children travel 10 miles each day to attend class. More clinics, tarred roads, telephones, parks and playgrounds are needed. And as elsewhere in South Africa, crime is pervasive and terrifying.

But vicious taxi wars, in which rival owners gunned down passengers and each other to control lucrative routes, have eased. So have deadly factional attacks from workers’ barracks known as hostels. Community groups work with police, and witnesses who cooperate are no longer burned alive as traitors.

“People are more tolerant now,” said Tebogo Pooe, manager of Soweto Community Radio, one of two local stations that began broadcasting last year. “People were at each other’s throats before. But everything has calmed down.”

Soweto is not some ancient Zulu or Xhosa word, a link to a proud past. The name was coined by white officials in the 1930s as an acronym for South West Townships, the giant ghetto they built for blacks.

Blacks worked for whites in mines, factories or in nearby Johannesburg but were forced to live in segregated areas without running water, electricity or other amenities. The sprawling suburb soon dwarfed Johannesburg, but it didn’t appear on maps until recently. Most streets still have no names.

Estimates of Greater Soweto’s population today usually range from 3 million to 5 million. The first official census will begin in October, but several recent academic studies have concluded that Soweto is considerably smaller, with fewer than 1.5 million people.

Research by Vista University’s Soweto campus in 1993 found that residents were richer and received better services than expected. Under apartheid, for example, blacks couldn’t own property here. Now nearly half the families surveyed owned their residences.

About 95% of homes had access to clean water, although some used outdoor taps, and 92% had electricity, the study found. Average monthly household income was about $600, more than in other townships. And there was stability: Most families had lived in their homes for more than a generation.

Some successful business leaders and politicians have moved to Johannesburg’s mostly white northern suburbs. But many more have not.

Dr. A. Nhlanhla Mabaso moved back to Dobsonville after medical school, for example, and opened his practice in an elegant building he designed.

“It was my idea that one day, if I can become a doctor, I can return to the community and give real, five-star treatment to the people,” Mabaso said in an office with art on the walls, thick carpets and mirrored ceilings. “If someone like me doesn’t invest in Soweto, who will?”

The apartheid rulers did their best to keep Soweto poor and to divide black ethnic groups here. But Soweto became a multicultural melting pot instead, with many residents speaking five or six African languages as well as English and Afrikaans.

Language was the issue in 1976 when hard-line apartheid officials ordered that Afrikaans, spoken by the ruling white minority, be the medium of instruction in black schools. Students and teachers angrily resisted.

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“It was an attempt to subdue us, to alienate us from our culture, our symbols, our language,” said Murphy Morobe, a prominent student leader then and a senior government official now.

But a peaceful march by several thousand students turned tragic when nervous police suddenly began shooting. Newspapers around the world published the photo of a fellow student carrying Hector Petersen’s body as his sister, Antoinette, ran screaming alongside.

“We were just kids,” Antoinette Sithole, now 36, recalled recently--the memory still raw after two decades. “How could they open fire? I just don’t understand. How could they kill children?”

Stone-throwing mobs burned hundreds of cars and buildings. Riots soon spread to 160 other townships. As the crackdown intensified, the struggle shifted from a children’s crusade to a mass movement to end white rule. Many joined underground liberation movements or guerrilla armies across the border.

South Africa was never the same.

“People were saying, ‘This is the end of the world,’ ” community activist Emmanuel Tseleli said, recalling the sight of Soweto in flames. “But we felt, ‘No, this is the beginning.’ And we were right.”