Soweto
  See & Feel the Township

Together with secure guides you will see the township. We’ll be traveling safe by car or minibus in a small group.

We take you to the historical sites in Orlando West, such as the High School where students on the 16 of June 1976 protested against Afrikaans as the official educational language. A bloodbath followed as the police fired at the students. You visit the Hector Peterson museum, build in remembrance of one of the students killed, a 13 year old boy. From here it's a nice walk to Vilakazi Street, the only street where two Nobel Peace Prize winners lived: Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former president Nelson Mandela.

We'll see Kliptown and the freedom square where you experience the day to day struggle for life that Sowetans have even today. With your guide you can visit the market there, on food of course, as one of us.

We visit Freedom Park. The squatter camp which was established as an informal settlement in the nineties nowadays has a formal status and government in bringing in services as water, sewer and electricity. In 2004 an RDP housing program was started. Experience daily live in a squatter camp, have a drink and exchange your feelings with the locals in a shebeen.

Our guides drive you around, showing you it all. The bright sides as the Southgate shopping mall, Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital (Africa's largest teaching hospital), Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's R4 million mansion. But also the darker side as the many squatter camps, illegal shebeens where some people start their drinking day at 7 in the morning.

The list of places to visit is long. It's impossible to see 'the real Soweto' in just one day. Together with your guide you make a choice of things and places you'd like to see. 
A brief list of the average things you can see: the Bara taxi rank and open-air market, the pedestrian bridge gives a view over the township, Mandela Village with tin shanties built on top of one another, hair salons, soccer stadiums, hundreds of churches and schools, elephant houses, the famous Regina Mundi Catholic Church, built in 1962. (This church played a significant role in the 60s, 70s and 80s, when political parties and gatherings were banned. The church became a meeting place of people fighting to overthrow the apartheid government), the Football and the Boxing Academy, the Soweto College of Education, the defunct power station with its two huge chimneys, the township's campus of the University of Johannesburg and even a visit to a Sowetan family is possible.

We'll show you Soweto in a pace that 'keeps up with the needs of the group' as we call it. We don't believe in the 'you have 6 minutes here and 17 there because the bus is about to leave', simply because THAT is something we hate ourselves.

Some facts and figures about Soweto

Soweto is actually short for SOuth WEstern TOwnships. Many people think Soweto is a town, but that's not true any more. 
Since 2001 Soweto is a part of Joburg (the City of Johannesburg). The cities government is divided into 11 regions. Two of these (regions 6 and 10 together) form the township which is known as Soweto.
The township or 'the location' as locals call it, stretches out over more than 130 square kilometres southwest of the city.

To make it even more complicated: Soweto is a combination of 21 townships, each with their own history and population. There are: Diepkloof, Orlando (West and East), Meadowlands, Killarney, Dobsonville, Naledi, Mapetla, Klipspruit, Pimville, Moroka, White City, Chiawelo, Moletsane, Molapo, Protea, Zola, Emdeni, Jabulani, Zondi, Rockville, Kliptown and Braamfischer. (have a look at the map on our internet site and get an impression)

Soweto was proclaimed in 1904, and intended to house the black workers in the Johannesburg gold mines west of the city.
In the 1930s when the economic situation was bad and unemployment high, thousands of rural black set for Johannesburg trying to find a job. Orlando, one of the first townships, changed rapidly into a squatter region with the erection of corrugated iron huts on any piece of vacant land. For years local government could and would not meet the needs of those people.
Throughout the 1940s more and more people streamed up to this ‘native location’ south-west of the city. Situation even got worse when the Nationalist apartheid government in the 1950s started to re-locate black people by force from Sophiatown and other places within Johannesburg to Soweto. New suburbs as Meadowlands, Dobsonville, Kliptown and Pimville were born.
Life in Soweto was tough, pollution was high, mainly because most of the township lived without electricity and people had to rely on coal until the mid 1980s.
Services were limited and over-crowding immense. On average of 15-20 people were living in a single four-roomed matchbox house.

Today much has changed.
A large scale scheme has brought electricity, water and sewerage systems to most houses. Highways help provide the service of hundreds of taxis ferrying commuters in and out of the city every day.
Restaurants, shopping centers, bars and clubs started up and foresee in a demand. 

Crime has come down a lot and is on acceptable levels now.
As a result of the countries Reconciliation and Development Program thousands of new houses are being build to improve living conditions.

Soweto changes, except for one thing: it remains the melting pot of African cultures.

‘Soweto. You’ll always remember'