We were watching one of those Joe Lopez and Lucasta Baloyi movies when my friend Sammy suddenly said he recognised the location. He said it was Soweto. The giveaway was the green-painted stones there. We were about seven years old. Lopez and Baloyi were cult figures in the black flicks back then.
I had never seen those particular green stones. So I, born and raised in Dobsonville, figured that meant I had never been to Soweto.
Dobsonville shares borders with Mofolo North, Zondi and Meadowlands. I had been to those places many times but now I wished I could go to Soweto.
I wished that, like Sammy, my father drove an Ellerines minibus collecting the furniture-shop salespeople from various points in Soweto. Sometimes Sammy’s dad took us along for the ride after school. Sometimes we went to Tladi, Diepkloof or to places the names of which I had never heard of before.
But I must have missed the day they went to Soweto.
I had spent virtually every weekend at my cousin Minki’s grandmother’s house in Zola. Sometimes we went to the Tladi jake — as swimming pools were called, after Jake Tuli, a great local boxer. But it never occurred to me that this was Soweto.
I had never heard anyone ask a taxi driver whether the cab was going to Soweto. And nobody I knew ever said they were going to visit their relatives in Soweto. It was always ko-Central, eS’godiphola or Mgababa. Never Soweto.
It did not matter that some of those places didn’t exist officially.
People in taxis never said they would get off when the taxi got to Soweto. Instead they asked to be dropped off at First Gate (eMndeni), Greenhouse in Mofolo, Sakkies (Moletsane-Jabulani) eNkomeni (Diepkloof), eMnqamlezweni (Zondi), even Eloff streets, one in Phiri and the other in Mofolo South.
Later, I heard people say they would get off at Edgars. This was a house in Senaoane whose owner had won thousands of rands in a competition sponsored by the fashion chain, enabling her to transform it from a four-roomed matchbox into a ‘big house with big windows and a stop-nonsense [precast wall]â€.
So where was this Soweto of green stones?
I know, now, that I was looking for the wrong landmarks. I should not have worried too much about not knowing the world as well as Sammy did. I should not have been so defensive later on when those of us from Dobsonville were ridiculed because we were not properly from Soweto — we fell under the Roodepoort magisterial district.
It did not help matters, either, that our soil was visibly redder than in many other parts of Soweto, thus causing us to be worthy prey of bullies from our neighbouring townships. Maybe they were just jealous because we in Dobsonville had electricity while they were at the mercy of the Apollo gas — the towering floodlights dotted around the locations.
This distinction between ‘real Soweto†and other Sowetos was never made when Peter ‘Terror†Mathebula of Dobsonville became the first black South African to win a world boxing title.
Soweto might have initially been an acronym for describing the township’s geographic relation to Johannesburg, but it was never about the geography.
It was about the energy that was exported by the Sophiatown men and women who thought themselves ‘fly†and ‘hipâ€. By being their offspring, we inherited the responsibility of being the coolest thing since Miles Davis.
This did not always go down well with natives of other townships who accused Sowetans, rightly or (mostly) wrongly, of being ‘geographic snobsâ€.
Some Sowetans deservedly got klapped for being abos’phume jozi (we are from Jo’burg) and behaving as if they owned the world. But there was more to Soweto than cheap bragging about our addresses.
Soweto was about the youth who, having witnessed first-hand the smoke and the dust courtesy of June 16 1976, knew that the establishment could be taken on.
At crèche our tiny voices would shout ‘black power†and we would punch the air when police vans passed by, because we had heard and seen our older brothers and sisters do the same.
There is not much about the infrastructure that separates Soweto from any other South African township. Unlike them though, it is Soweto that Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu chose as their home when they trekked to Jo’burg. By so doing, they gave the world the only street with two Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
Soweto, like other ghettoes created as labour reserves, from Guguletu in Cape Town to Seshego in Polokwane, has its own wise guys who live purely on their wits alongside the hard-working men and women sacrificing themselves to improve their children’s lot.
Like Soweto, these townships still have too many poor people and bad roads. There are shacks everywhere. It is still relatively dangerous to venture out in the dark alone. Burst sewerage pipes are still commonplace.
Then again, I have never heard anyone say Soweto is perfect. But I have seen many times, including in Durban recently, bumper stickers saying ‘I love Sowetoâ€.