I didn’t take any pictures of that stuff, of course.

Honestly, all I’ve ever known about South Africa is what I’ve seen on the news, dubious descriptions from a bonehead South African exchange student in high school (he wasn’t a bonehead because of any racism-related issues, he was just a doofus), and now this from you guys.

I’d seen some stuff about the middle- and upper-class portions of Soweto over the past several years, and completely forgotten about them until I read this. Hm.

I wonder how many Americans are like me — stuck with a 1988 understanding of it. Probably most of us. The sticky, arcane details of the day-to-day economy and life don’t make good news footage, you know? Like a good liberal, I embraced the dire portions, proceeded to do nothing about it, and maintained those frozen assumptions with startling consistency over roughly twenty years.

I guess it’s back to NPR for me, warts and all. Bread Line of the Month stories aside, they do keep a bit more up-to-date on South Africa (and the rest of the damned world) than me and my dim recollection of boycotting Coca Cola in college for some reason or other.

It does make you wonder what the half-life on a bad history is for a country, though. I mean, I’m sure South Africa still has its problems to solve, but you have to figure that even doing things totally right still starts the fifty-years-until-you’re-not-bastards clock ticking. Think about Germany and Japan. Eeesh.

It’s also worth noting that Soweto is huge, with quite a spectrum of living conditions. Some of the houses are really very nice. It’s not all squalor and despair at all, though we liberal Americans tend to think of it that way.

The power plant is no longer in use, because of all the pollutants it pumped into the environment. It was shut down for both practical and symbolic reasons.

I guess that’s more what I was asking — whether people feel like things are getting better. And it sounds like they don’t, at least not fast enough.

I assume the power plant now also provides power to Soweto? I’m surprised, in a way, that they put it there — seems like it would be very convenient to saboteurs. Anyhow, let’s hope it at least provides a few jobs to Soweto now.

Mom, the place the where Hector Peterson was shot is in Soweto, and that memorial has been built a block away. Another thing Soweto has is a street that was home to two Nobel peace-prize winner, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

That power plant in several of these photos is one of many apartheid reminders. The whites built a power plant in Soweto to generate power for themselves in Johannesburg, but there was no power provided in Soweto originally — it was just a good place to put the power plant so that no whites would have it in their back yard.

Tony Blair was in Soweto on Thursday, talking on a radio show. One of our guides said he tried to call in to ask Blair whether he was still going to be the Foreign Affairs Secretary of the Bush administration after he’s no longer Prime Minister of the UK. (Apparently Nelson Mandela gave Tony that title a few years ago.)

Mom

Seriously, great pics again. Walking around, do you get the feeling that people are optimistic? I can see some optimism in the pictures, but I get kind of a nothing-to-do feel from some of the pictures, too. And do you get a welcome feeling?