The
Oprah South African Leadership Project provides cross-cultural
immersion and international exposure through travel
and study in South Africa for Morehouse College students.
In the future, it will involve an exchange of students
between Morehouse and South Africa, and will encompass
ethical leadership training and community service
in both Atlanta and South Africa.
May 27, 2005
 To
tour Soweto is to study the best and worst of the
human condition.
It
is Nelson Mandela’s former abode, a humble structure
a few blocks away from that of former Archbishop Desmond
Tutu, and the large manse of Winnie Mandela, who is
an outcast in the community where she once walked
with anti-apartheid activists.
It
is the neighborhood with small, manicured lawns and
houses designed with clean lines and elaborate fences.
It is the shacks that lack a sewer system, running
water and electricity—a multitude of them that
stretch for as far as the eye can see, down the hill,
past the power lines, through the brush, up the hill.
It
is the open space littered with traces of humanity:
the gas stations, the concrete medians, goats for
sell alongside a makeshift auto shop, alongside the
places named after civil rights leaders, both alive
and dead.
It
is the last remaining vestiges of oppression: the
two widening concrete stacks that look more like nuclear
generators than the electrical generators they once
were. Built during apartheid, they supplied power
to the white suburbs miles and miles away, not Soweto.
Some say the electrical current was harming people.
When apartheid ended, the power station closed. Now
painted with a rainbow of colors, they look less threatening,
but the memory of what they meant still remains.
Soweto,
an acronym for Southern Western Townships, contains
34 townships and is the largest of South Africa 's
townships. With a population of four to five million
people, most of them black and most of them unemployed,
Soweto is evidence of the transition South Africa
has made and how far the country must still come.
Molefi Mataboge, the logistics coordinator for the
Morehouse College and Butler University trip, was
born and raised in Soweto. Combining history with
many of his own accounts, he drives through Soweto
talking about each space—trash filled or beautified—as
if it held a thousand stories.
As
the group arrives at a dilapidated area where black
miners once lived, and where destitute men now carve
a life, Mataboge talks about how the security police
played blacks against each other. He said that when
The New York Times ran a story about black-on-black
violence, he demanded to talk to the reporter and
get a retraction.
"There
was no black-on-black violence," said Mataboge,
who was an anti-apartheid activist. "The security
police would kill two men, each from a different township,
and place the body from one township into the other
and tell that township that the other township killed
the man, which put them at odds with each other."
It
was not until the TRC hearings that many people discovered
that the police was behind much of the strife between
townships.
In
1905, the first houses went up in Soweto. The black
areas were called townships, the white areas suburbs.
The government even made separate roads for the races
to use—whites on one; blacks on another.
 "We
used to joke that all the [apartheid] laws were made
in a bar because of the way some of the laws were
made," said Mataboge. "We couldn't build
a house more than a story high. Then there was the
one where you could be detained for 40 days without
a trial. People were arrested on charges and they'd
call their lawyer and the lawyer would say, 'Oh, they
made that law yesterday.'"
As
an activist, Mataboge became heavily involved in the
movement during the '80s. He said during that time,
he rarely slept at home for fear it could bring harm
to his family members. Rooftops, the streets and anywhere
else that seemed safe to lay his head became his home.
For a year, he only got three hours of sleep a day,
said Mataboge.
As
the group rides past the only golf course in Soweto,
the school where “Sarafina” was filmed,
and stops at the Hector Pieterson Museum, built in
memory of the first person to die in the Soweto school
children's protest, the van becomes quiet, interrupted
only by the occasional click of a few cameras.
The
group exits the van and steps into the museum, where
television monitors flash news reports and interviews
with government officials and young blacks.
But
the written words the youth sang as they marched toward
police or chanted among themselves are perhaps the
most powerful: "Senzeni na? Isono sethu bubmnyama
lamabhulu azizinja," meaning, "What have
we done? Our crime is our blackness. These white rulers
are dogs."
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