More pics from the township church to follow.
It's kind of true that when most white folk open their mouths, their
hips lock. Add a language with no shared Germanic or Latin roots, and
it becomes rather hilarious. Fortunately, professor Jacobs has done
this many times before. His kindness, patience, consistent joy, and
plain skill lifted and carried us through learning the songs. Tonight
we'll see how much of what we learned we can resurrect in our concert
with a local choir in another (formerly all black) township.
It is notable for an infamous event during the struggle against apartheid (which, in an earlier post I confused with the massacre at another township, Sharpeville [I think it's called]).
The SA Ministry of Education, in the mid 1970's, sought to supress black consciousness, by requiring that all education of black schoolchildren be conducted in Afrikaans--the language of the Boers. Teachers were teaching in a mixture of English and native languages. Connecting the kids with English connected them with a largely anti-apartheid outside world, and filled them with subversive ideology. Afrikaans was the language of the pro-apartheid minority, and it's news media presented no threat to the kids accepting their subordinate role. The Ministry of Education saw no real problem in there being very few Afrikaans-speaking black schoolteachers, which made compliance impossible. On June 16, 1976, thousands of children marched unarmed in Soweto, to protest the language rule.
Agitation ensued within the crowd, and among the police,sent to break up the demonstration. Stones were thrown, and the police opened up with live ammunition, firing into the crowd. Hector Pieterson, a 13 year old, was killed. A photo of him, being carried dying from the
scene by another schoolchild, shot around the world, provoking widespread outrage. In the ensuing violent uprising, 566 people were killed. Even white South Africa began to realize that apartheid was unsustainable, though it would be many increasingly violent and fearful years before Nelson Mandela was released from prison and a democratic constitution was established.
Soweto is also notable as perhaps the only city where two Nobel laureates (Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu) live on the same block.
Several posts following this one will mention details of our time in this fascinating and very large part of greater metropolitan Joburg.
The city is slowly recovering, especially as it prepares to host the
World Cup soccer games in a few years.
Note the broken-out windows on this landmark skyscraper.
Much of the history presented here occurred during times when I was in
college. I'm always fascinated (when traveling) to compare the kind of
understanding one can get from an on-scene, in-depth presentation to
that which comes from the "newstainment" we get at home.
A dear friend in San Diego (a US citizen who emigrated from SA during
apartheid) once told me a little about the climate of fear as SA
struggled to sustain apartheid. When prison was a place of torture and
extrajudicial executions, when everyone you meet could be an
informer. At today's museum, we saw stories of people fleeing the
violence, whose families were afraid that sheltering them would bring
the police. That's perhaps one of the most toxic effects of
totalitarianism--it destroys trust between ordinary people.
The detail at the museum was impressive. The banality of the violence,
the system of racial classification by bureaucrats using shifting and
arbitrary criteria. The impact of these classifications on the
ordinary people. The struggles of the liberation movements.
I saw an early interview of Mandela, before he went to prison. He
described his vision of a SA with full racial equality. We sort of
marvel at his willingness to seek social reconcilliation after the end
of aartheid. Yet, I learned today, this was his vision all along.
