Angella Johnson VIEW FROM A BROAD
They call themselves Tupac – after the murdered American gangsta rap singer Tupak Shakur – and are the latest gang to terrorise Soweto’s womenfolk, whom they abduct and rape with apparent impunity.
“Some of them are HIV-positive and they do these things in order to deliberately pass on the virus,” explains local tour guide Jerry Marobyane. “It’s their form of revenge for having contracted the disease.”
Wow, this is rough stuff! Not exactly the kind of information one expects from a tourist excursion. It is certainly not for the faint hearted, or those looking for a glossy view of this sprawling metropolis outside Johannesburg.
But then again this is no ordinary junket. The Sincere Soweto Tour Company, run by photographer Greg Marinovich and street-smart 27-year-old Jerry Marobyane, aims to offer tourists a slice of real township life.
“We want to show people the good, the bad and the ugly side of this town, so they get a real idea of how people live work and play,” says Marinovich.
We are driving around in his girlfriend’s spanking new car (a tempting little number for any would-be carjacker), and I must say it feels weird having a Polish-speaking white boy – albeit a Pulitzer prize-winning one – showing me the sights.
Our itinerary includes meeting an old man who was part of the historic drafting of the Freedom Charter; visiting a centre for those disabled in the 1976 student uprising; bone throwing with a sangoma; and chatting with a young car hijacker.
It is all very informal and Marobyane warns that “African time” (where an 11am appointment can be anytime up to 2pm) is very much the order of the day. “You never know if the people you want to see will be around,” he says.
So it is not surprising that, when we rock up at a shabby little house in Kliptown to meet Ernest Lollan, who I’m told handed out Freedom Charter pamphlets as a boy in the 1950s, we find he is not home.
A couple of wary-looking youths pulling apart a car next door (I hope it’s theirs) tell us he has gone to collect his pension.
“Oh well, no point in hanging around. He might not be back for ages,” says Marinovich. I was looking forward to hearing stories about Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress comrades turning up for meetings in their many disguises.
“Listen, this is not a zoo,” snaps Marinovich, noticing my disappointment. “These are real people with real lives. This is just a sideline for them to earn a little extra bucks, so if they have more important things to do, then so be it.”
I am still miffed, so he and Marobyane decide a spot of clothes shopping might improve my spirits. “We’re taking you to the African Jet outlet,” says Marobyane.
But wait! This looks like a market, I state, as we turn into a maze of stalls filled with everything from meat (horse, apparently) and live chickens to cheap household goods.
We drive into a clearing where before us is a spread of second-hand clothing, laid out like a spectacular patchwork blanket on the dusty ground. This is where many township women shop for items (mostly junk) priced from 50c upwards.
“Oh, business is bad,” moans Francina Baloyi, a buxom matron dressed in a mismatch of her own stock. “People can’t come so often because they don’t have jobs and their purse is empty, but I’m here six days a week.”
Marinovich buys a pair of cut-off dungarees for R10 and she all but kisses his feet. As for me, well … I’ve kinda lost my shopping zeal.
We then zip past Winnie Madikizela- Mandela’s Orlando West home (such a major component of the “struggle” tourist route that some enterprising folk have opened a coffee shop next door) and breeze by the Hector Peterson Memorial, teeming with busloads of tourists.
“We only stop if people are really interested,” explains Marinovich. “As for the old Mandela house – we don’t do museums.”
According to my customised tour (it was planned for two American women who dropped out at the 11th hour), it is now time for my spell with a sangoma. She turns out to be an ex-girlfriend of Marobyane’s, whom he accuses of having used muti to trap him.
Because they parted recently on decidedly bad terms, it seems, much to my annoyance, that my reading is off.
“She’s a witch, I tell you,” cries Marobyane dramatically. Great, so then she’ll be good, I respond.
“Too good,” he replies. “She knows how to trap a man to her, and how to get money out of him.”
By now I’m feeling peckish, so we head for one of Soweto’s popular eateries – the kind they call a “buy and braai”. Here you purchase meat and wors from a butcher, shake on some seasoning and cook it yourself over a braai.
It is not exactly McDonald’s, but this is the way many township people do lunch – at a fraction of the cost of a Big Mac (and a darn sight more nutritious, I’m sure).
Eating pap and vleis under a makeshift canopy in someone’s garden, I listen as Marobyane, a former self-defence unit member, recalls how he lost his right hand in a grenade attack by Inkatha members in 1991.
“We were taking some people to a shack for safety when someone threw something at us,” he says. “I grabbed it, then realising it was a grenade, tried to throw it back. But the police shot me in the leg and I fell.”
He still attempted to dispatch the pinless incendiary device, only to have it explode centimetres from his hand.
Marobyane admits tourists are usually shocked when he describes the extent of violence in the township at the time. They become even more disturbed by what is perhaps the highlight of the trip – hobnobbing with a car hijacker, who describes how he shoots and kills his victims.
But when we arrive at the young gangster’s mother’s house (she is a colonel in the South African National Defence Force), no one is at home.
We later learn from thugs hanging outside the Morris Isaacson School (where the 1976 student’s uprising erupted) that he was arrested after hijacking a car in Bloemfontein and was in prison because he couldn’t afford to pay his R10 000 bail.
“Ah well,” says Marinovich. “We were thinking of cutting out the gangster part anyway, because it upsets some tourists.”
As alternative tours go, this one is like being invited to a pot-luck dinner: you never know what you might get.
But if you are lucky, it offers a taste of daily township struggles, rather than the usual trip to the Blue Fountain shebeen and Mandela’s old house.