S. Africa Tries to Sell the Struggle

The gleaming white bus pulls up in front of a sea of colorful galvanized-metal shacks, and about 60 tourists from Europe, the United States and Japan tumble out of the air-conditioned vehicle.

Some of the tourists focus their expensive digital cameras on the ramshackle homes, clicking away as they saunter down a dusty path. A few stop to talk to residents, whose tiny barren yards are ringed mostly by barbed wire.

After 20 minutes, the tourists clamber into the bus and head for the spot where a schoolboy was fatally shot in a 1976 student uprising--an event that helped trigger international outrage against this nation’s racist apartheid system. The last stop is a local shebeen, or unlicensed bar, to join a few locals for some beers, pap--maize porridge--and mutton stew.

As Johannesburg, South Africa, plays host to an estimated 100,000 people attending the United Nations’ World Summit on Sustainable Development this week, the city hopes to capitalize on its latest organized tourist attraction: townships and other showpieces of its apartheid past.

Soweto, an acronym for South Western Townships, is the metropolis that apartheid built. Just six miles southwest of Johannesburg, it exploded from a small nest of settlements for poor black workers to a 60-square-mile area that by some estimates is now home to 3.5 million people.

Visitors will be encouraged to spend the night at private Soweto homes, soak up the night life at shebeens and discover how the majority of urbanites here live.

“This is the good, the bad and the ugly,” Joe Motsogi, a tour guide, bellowed recently to a group of tourists packed into his minivan. “Contrary to popular belief, you are not going to be killed. You are about to meet warm and welcoming people of So-weyy-toow.”

Motsogi, a former beer and insurance salesman, likes stretching his words like a televangelist. He uses the microphone and loudspeaker in his minivan to answer questions--even when you’re sitting next to him.

He is also among 15 tour operators who run thriving businesses specializing in Soweto tours, which cost about $40, including lunch at a shebeen. Soweto has become such a popular tourist destination that Johannesburg decided to market it, inviting tourists to visit “The Struggle Route.”

“For decades, the world was interested in the anti-apartheid struggle,” said Tasneem Carrim, a spokeswoman for the city. “People are coming here to see for themselves what brought the apartheid government to its knees.”

Interest in South Africa’s apartheid past has been a boon for Johannesburg’s fledgling tourist industry. Until recently, visitors typically shunned Johannesburg, with its carjackings and other crime, for the Kruger game reserve, South Africa’s wine country or Cape Town and other coastal resorts.

But after apartheid was dismantled nearly a decade ago, some of the people who in their own countries had participated in protests against the system or had boycotted companies investing in South Africa began coming here to look at political symbols and places that they had only seen on television or read about in newspapers.

Many of the houses in Soweto are not shanties. With their red-tiled roofs and uniform architecture, many would fit well in a suburban California neighborhood. Motsogi likes to tell his clients that more than 50 millionaires now live in Soweto.

“And I,” he said with a chuckle, “am a millionaire in training.”

Motsogi says he and other tour operators are trying to convince locals that bringing tourists to their neighborhood will benefit them and their country.

“We tell them that they are not like animals being gazed at in a zoo,” he said. “People who come here want to understand history and culture.”

During one tour, 58-year-old Kholekile Nkuhlusi stood next to his blue galvanized shack--which measures about 8 by 8 feet--and watched a small group of visitors walk by.

“I’m happy that they are seeing how we live and how tough our [existence] is,” said Nkuhlusi, who has been unemployed for five years. “But they must help us with a little something.”

The so-called Struggle Route includes the recently opened Apartheid Museum and the Hector Pieterson Memorial, named after the first schoolboy to die in the 1976 Soweto uprising.

At the Regina Mundi Roman Catholic Church, where anti-apartheid activists frequently sought refuge from police, church wardens point to bullet holes in the ceiling and the stained-glass windows.

“Don’t sign your name next to Slick Willie,” a church guide warned one recent visitor, pointing to the signature in the visitors’ book of former President Clinton, who came to the church with his wife, Hillary, in 1998. “Unless you know you’re going to be the president of the United States.”

Behind the last pew is a quilt with messages to people lost to AIDS, which by all accounts has ravaged Soweto.

“This is our new struggle,” the guide said.

After the 3 1/2-hour tour ends, Motsogi drives his clients back to their comfortable hotels and homes in upscale areas including Sandton, where the World Summit will be held.

“It’s amazing that in the 21st century, people still live like that,” said one visitor who had entered a resident’s shack.

“This is the real South Africa,” said another visitor, Noga Oron, who lives in a million-dollar house in Rosebank, another up-market neighborhood.

Motsogi says about 25% of his clients are white South Africans who want to see Soweto for themselves.

“We are all learning a lot about each other,” he said. “After the trip, they see the people here are not beasts but have the same hopes and dreams that they have.”

His trips have also furthered his own education.

“I was a member of the club that thought every white person was an oppressor,” he said.

“Only when I started to talk to white people, and found out that they too helped and felt the same way about apartheid, then I began to realize.... “