Soweto Bike Tour

Tshema, Dan, and I took a bike tour of Soweto, which was a great way to see the community. The tour guide was a young, charismatic man who provided a fascinating historical narrative.

Brief History

Soweto, which is an abbreviation of South Western Township, is a large township right outside Johannesburg. The township started as an informal settlement, as many Africans were recruited to work in the nearby gold mines. Following an outbreak of plague in the early 1900's, the British started moving black Africans out of Johannesburg to "evacuation camps" located in Soweto. The British calimed that the relocation was to "protect" these people, but when they were not allowed to move back into the city and were not given any municipal services, the real reason for the relocation became clear. Not sure if everyone has seen District 9, a great film by South African Director Neill Blomkamp, but the story of the Soweto relocation sounds very similar to the events that happen in that movie.

Nelson Mandela also lived in Soweto for several years before he spent time in prison. Desmond Tutu also lived in Soweto. In fact, Soweto claims to be the only place in the world where two Nobel Prize Winners started on the same street.

Soweto was also the site of massive protests in the late 1970s. The protests were in response to the government enforcing education in Afrikaans rather than English. Several thousand protesters marched to a main square in Soweto, where police opened fire into the crowd. A few hundred protesters died and many more were injured. One of the first to die was a young boy named Hector Pieterson, who is seen being carried in the graphic photo below. The intersection where these protests took place is now the site of a memorial and a museum.

"To honour the youth who gave their lives in the struggle for freedom and democracy"

On a lighter note, one of the other highlights of the bike tour was the chance to taste the local beer, which is brewed in Soweto. It's difficult to describe the taste, but it's slightly sweet, sour, and definitely fermented. It wasn't bad, but as you can see from the before/after pictures, it's not exactly good.

Another fun fact about Soweto, is that the famous song from the Lion King, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was originally written and composed in Soweto in 1939! It was originally called "Mbube" which simply means "lion" in Zulu.

Soweto is also home to the largest soccer stadium in Africa. FNB stadium (usually called Soccer City) can seat 90,000+ fans and hosted the 2010 World Cup Finals (Netherlands vs. Spain). There were a bunch of Dutch tourists on our bike tour and the guide repeatedly, and shamelessly, brought up the fact that Soweto was the site where they lost the World Cup. We didn't actually get to see the stadium, but I'm hoping to see a soccer match there sometime in the future.

Nat Geo photo, not mine...

Here are some other random pics from our tour.

Our guide selling us on the beer.