Soweto was created in the 1930s when the white government started separating blacks from whites to create black "townships". It also attracted the working poor,  Coloureds and Indians and quickly became a community where mixed races generally intermingled. With the onset of apartheid, there was great concern over this and most of the non-black residents were moved elsewhere. Soweto is now 98.5% black and still very poor. 

Until 1976, the "matchbox" houses were provided to black residents with jobs, on lease; they were not allowed to do any renovations or build a fence or even hang curtains because the police had the right to spy on them at any time. Now the houses are owned, many by the families who leased them, but there are strict rules about who and how many can live in them.

We visited Mandala's home on our tour, where he lived both before and after his 27-year imprisonment and where his second wife Winnie lived and was regularly harassed and often arrested while he was in prison. She spent 200 days in solitary. When Mandela got out of prison, he and Winnie divorced. She apparently wanted revenge and he wanted peace and they found that irreconcilable. (He became the first black president of South Africa when he was 76, married his third wife when he was 80 and died at 95.)

Other interesting facts:

• Soweto has the only street in the world (Vilakazi St) on which two Nobel Peace Prize winners had homes (Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu).
• One of Mandela's sons, Makgatho Mandela, died of AIDS in 2005.
• The Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto (formerly an Imperial military hospital) is the largest hospital in Africa and the 7th largest in the world. Since it became a public hospital in 1991, the quality of care has gone steadily downhill. Our tour guide was born there but says he wouldn't want his future children to be born there.
• The uprising that brought Soweto to the attention of the rest of the world, on June 16 1976, involved 10000 unarmed students marching to the stadium to protest the government's policy to enforce education in Afrikaans instead of in their native language. Police threw tear gas and opened fire. 176 students were killed and 1000 injured.
• In 2010, Soweto hosted the FIFA World Cup final.

While we were biking around Soweto today, here's what I noticed.

Differences from home:

• crumbling streets and sidewalks
• garbage everywhere
• lots of open fires, both for cooking and for burning trash (Near the end of our afternoon the air was filled with sooty smoke and the skies turned orange because there was so much trash being burned. Apparently this is because the refuse collectors, on contract from the government, are corrupt and don't work very hard.)
• drivers tolerant of bike riders

Similarities to home:

• lots of families in the park
• a group of girls on their way home from school giggling and practising dance steps
• kids and adults laughing and smiling and saying hi to us all day. (Our tour guide told us they are unused to seeing "the elderly" riding bikes!)

us on the bike tour (with Sara from the East Van Gogos) in front of the Soweto Towers (abandoned utility towers re-created as a recreational zone with a bungie jump and many other things, and paid advertisers)

us at the Nelson Mandela house between memorials to Winnie and Nelson

a matchbox house

Hector Pieterson, a 12-year-old who died during the 1976 uprising