The industrial and financial hub for South Africa — — you see sky scrapers and busy roads but it all it offers to the visitor is the Apartheid Museum, the tours of the SOWETO region and the business and shopping centers at Sandton city (also has a Nelson Mandela statue)
Soweto showcases the history, culture, and resilience in the heart of South Africa. Once a sprawling shantytown of black workers, Soweto became a symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle after the 1976 uprising, when police fired on protesting students. Freedom fighters Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, etc. came from here.
The apartheid museum gives a detailed and powerful presentation of the entire apartheid movement and the struggle against it. However, it left me quite unmoved.
We had something similar in our country and Indian school curriculum cover the Indian struggle for freedom and we (at least all who are now 45+) know it well. Our struggle for freedom was no less bloody and terrifying than the South Africans
Indians in the past, had a class divide based on caste- each with a distinct hierarchy and place in society, with specific laws of interaction, different laws, education, permissible jobs. etc.
Further we were subjugated and ruled over by the British for over a hundred years. Our indigenous industries were destroyed, education systems compromised, they forced their own religion and generally treated all Indians as lower-class citizens.
Maybe we had an external enemy — the British, so we had a target for our ire, while South Africa had their own countrymen divide and rule them- so the impact was more felt by them
Isn’t focusing on the apartheid movement/ SOWETO just promoting the same discrimination?
— even tho’ foreign tourist currency is welcome. It’s time for Jo’burg to focus on better things which actually integrates the blacks, non-blacks, mixed and Asian into one whole than to keep harping on the woes of the apartheid and glorifying the struggles against it.
The plants at Jo’burg were incredible — I have never seen those varieties of flowers and plants anywhere (not that I have travelled all that much)
Another strange sight was the almost motionless people standing at busy crossroads- either with or without a placard- Beggars
We visited Cape Town, Knysna, South Africa and the Kruger National Park — a separate write up for each