Date: February 27, 2008 6:46:58 AM HST

Saturday, February 16, 2008 – Soweto Township

For the past eleven days, with the exception of the four days Yunus and I traveled to Swaziland, we have been staying with the Ahmed family in Roshnee, a formerly all-Indian township in Vereeniging, about twenty-five kilometers outside Jo’burg. Razvi, Yunus’ classmate since his high school days at Waterford and his best friend, is married to Firdose, and they have three children: Raeesah (14), Nabeel (12, but almost 13, he says) and Shakeel (9). Their hospitality has been such that I have come to feel like a member of the family, except that Firdose still keeps trying to make me eat more than I should.

Although Roshnee is no longer a designated Indian township, Indians make up more than ninety per cent of its population. The Muslim call to prayer echoes through the township on loudspeakers five times a day, beginning just before sunrise (4:45 a.m. at this time of year) until about an hour and a half after sunset (8:15 p.m. tonight), and the three kids attend madressa four or five times a week. One of the meats at breakfast one morning looked a lot like sliced ham; it struck me as strange for a Muslim family to offer ham, but I didn’t say anything, thinking that every family makes its compromises between religious doctrine and religious practice. Days later, when the topic of food came up, I asked Firdose about the ham at breakfast, and got a look as if I’d accused her of murder, then an assurance that the meat was in fact beef. Fortunately, she has a sense of humor, so no harm, no foul.

Razvi, a physician (Ear, Nose and Throat), has a private practice and has also been practicing at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto Township for more than two decades, which means that he found himself in the middle of some of the worst violence in modern South African history. More on this shortly…

I had been told that Baragwanath is the largest hospital in Africa and that at one time it was the largest in the world, and I’ve read about how central it has always been to the people of Soweto, given that it’s the only hospital that serves that huge township. So at my request, he took me on a tour of the place; Shakeel came along as well.

How do I tell you how HUGE Baragwanath is – capitalizing “huge” won’t do. Razvi doesn’t know how many acres its many buildings occupy, but how’s this for huge: physicians make their rounds by car. Or this: it has its own power plant and its own police station. Or this: the building which housed nurses (and now houses some nurses and mostly AIDS patients) appears to be about ten stories high. Many of the low-rise buildings formerly served as military barracks, and frankly, they still look more like barracks than hospital buildings – inside and out. As we passed the emergency surgery unit (there is also an emergency medical unit), Razvi mentioned that tonight being a Saturday night, doctors can expect to perform sixty emergency surgeries. In fact, Baragwanath is a great training hospital: doctors come here from all over the world to experience a range of cases in two months that they won’t get in five years at home.

My senses told me that this is a poor person’s hospital: bathroom and trash odors mixed with the normal hospital smells. Hospital waste packed in black household trash bags sat in various unsecured outdoor locations waiting to be picked up. Patients, a few of whom walked the grounds while hooked up to IV units, were mostly dressed in soiled or unhygienic-looking pajamas. It took Shakeel to ask what I was thinking (and already knew the answer to): “Daddy, why is this hospital so dirty?” “Because they don’t have enough money to pay enough people to keep it clean,” Razvi replied. He then mentioned to me that Baragwanath currently operates with a shortage of six hundred nurses.

Razvi’s able to keep all this in perspective, given all he’s experienced here, because things are better than they used to be. Example: one day while Razvi was on duty during the worst of the Soweto anti-apartheid riots, a policeman dragged a prisoner into the emergency unit. The cop literally dragged the prisoner because his legs had been broken (by the cop, surmised Razvi), but in addition, he had placed the prisoner in legs irons. Razvi asked the cop to remove the leg irons so that he could work on the man’s legs, but the cop refused – he was afraid that the prisoner would run away! Razvi insisted, explaining that 1) the prisoner’s broken legs made it highly unlikely that he could escape, and 2) he (Razvi) couldn’t work on the guy’s broken legs otherwise. The cop grew frustrated, and asked Razvi to leave the area for a minute, which he did. Seconds later, hearing a gunshot, Razvi rushed in to see the prisoner’s brains and blood all over the cubicle. The cop calmly walked away.

After the hospital tour, Razvi drove me through parts of Soweto. The first thing I learned – and what you sharp-eyed readers have already figured out – is that I’ve been spelling “Soweto” wrong -it’s not “Suweto,” but “Soweto,” an abbreviation for “SOuthWEstern TOwnships.”

Though there’s no confusion about how to spell it, there’s a great deal of uncertainty about the number of townships that comprise greater Soweto and the number of people who live in this vast area southwest of Jo’burg. Some townships have officially merged with others during the past few years; other have merged unofficially – the resulting estimates of the number of townships range from twenty-nine to eighty-seven. The official 2001 census numbers the population at 900,000, but other, more reliable sources multiply that by five. Razvi estimates it at around four million.

Before today, I had heard of the Soweto uprisings of June, 1976; the rest of what I knew came from having just read My Traitor’s Heart, by Rian Malan. Here’s what he says about Soweto at the time of the riots: “There was a drastic shortage of houses and schools in Soweto. There were no cinemas, no bars, no hotels, no modern shopping centers, no recreational facilities, and no electricity. The place was a giant labor barracks, grimly utilitarian, and intentionally so. The mad scientists of apartheid wanted urban blacks to be miserable. They wanted blacks to get out of white South Africa, to go to the homelands. Soweto was one big apartheid atrocity.”

The riots began over a seemingly peripheral issue. (Again quoting Malan), “…pupils at several Soweto schools had gone out on strike against the imperial Afrikaner government. Urban blacks reviled Africaans as the language of the oppressor, and most black schools chose English as their medium of instruction. The Vorster government felt slighted. It didn’t want its Bantu vassals becoming Anglicized, so it decreed that certain subjects would henceforth be taught in Africaans. It didn’t matter that many teachers and pupils could hardly speak the language, or that their textbooks were in English. The Vorster government ignored petitions and turned away deputations, so the students called a strike…A few stones were thrown, and the police opened fire, killing two young boys and wounding untold others.

“The schools and government installations were destroyed first. Then the mob turned on anything associated with the white economic structure, burning trucks, delivery vans, shops, and banks. The tinder had been accumulating for generations, and once it caught the conflagration was unstoppable.

“The police…put the rebellion down at a terrible cost in lives. When the fires finally died down several months later, there were four hundred black corpses, or five hundred, or seven hundred, and the police were firmly back in control. Newspapers proclaimed that the situation had returned to normal, but there was no longer any such thing. South Africa’s psychic landscape had been transformed. Blacks saw that they had shaken the white power structure to its very foundations, and they suddenly had hope. The tide of history had turned.”

Soweto continued to be a violent place for almost the next two decades: white-on-black violence, black-on-white violence, and black-on-black violence. Some was revolutionary violence, some simply the result of violence becoming the norm. And, given what can be expected on a typical Saturday night in the Baragwanath emergency rooms, I might be excused for assuming that Soweto continues to be a violent place.

Yet I learned today that there’s more to the place than this. Though almost no whites live here (other than those married to blacks), Soweto is not an all-black community. Originally a set of townships with a mixture of blacks, Indians, and colored, the government later decreed individual townships for individual races. Today the townships are again mostly mixed, but some are de facto populated by a single race. As we cruised through Kliptown, I saw only black faces.

And though what I saw of Kliptown consisted of the usual signs of poverty, I’ve heard and read that Soweto has its middle and even upper class dwellings. Glancing through the October, 2006 issue of Getaway (an African travel magazine), I came across an article entitled “48 Hours in Soweto.” The haole author attempts to dispel the notion that Soweto is a dangerous place for fellow haoles to visit, yet he was accompanied by a black companion during his two-day visit, and he recommends to readers of Getaway (clearly a magazine intended for a haole readership) that “it is essential to take a local guide if you are in any doubt about where you’re going.” I haven’t been in South Africa for long, but I know that he’s not referring to the possibility of a visitor getting lost in an Indian area of Soweto.

And how do I interpret the following brief incident? At one point on our cruise through Kliptown, we pulled off onto a side street to make a u-turn. A car had stopped a few feet ahead of where we turned around, and a half-dozen or so young black men were hanging out. They did not look threatening to me. All of a sudden a police car showed up, and two black policemen got out. They lined the young men up and proceeded to frisk them.

As we were leaving Soweto, I asked Razvi, who in his two decades at Baragwanath had waded into the most violent of situations, if he had ever felt afraid. “Never,” he said. Crowds would part when they saw the round “Baragwanath” sticker on his car’s windshield.
“And do you ever feel afraid these days?” I asked. “Not afraid,” he replied, “but I am more cautious.”

A few words on My Traitor’s Heart. When I knew I’d be coming to South Africa, I asked Heather MacMillan, a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology (focusing on Africa) to recommend some books for me to read. She recommended only one – and it was My Traitor’s Heart. Rian Malan is a white man descended from an historic and powerful white family, some members of which have been responsible for passing and enforcing some of the more odious apartheid laws. The book deals with all the complexities and contradictions of being a white man in South Africa, and though I am not well-read on the subject, I know why Heather stopped after recommending just this book. You know how the blurbs on the front and back covers of a book are usually exaggerations meant to entice one to buy the book? In this case, every word of praise is deserved – it’s an incredibly powerful, moving, and honest book, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s the only book I’ve ever begun a second time immediately after having finished the first reading.