South Africa -- Day 9

This morning, we woke up to the smell of bacon – my brother cooking “American” bacon for us! Thank God! I have been trying to get a good piece of bacon here since we arrived and have been unsuccessful. Their bacon is a Canadian-type bacon, and the type of bacon we eat at home is called streaky bacon and is done very chewy and soft. I like my bacon crispy, but cannot seem to get it this way. So this was an awesome way to wake up! We had bacon and eggs with toast and got dressed for the day in Soweto.

We were to meet my brother’s coworker Ronald, who lives there and would be showing us around. We were a little bit late and got a little turned around looking for the futbol stadium we were to meet him at. We finally ended up having to pull into a gas station and wait for Ronald to come find us! Once we met him, we followed him in his car to his house, then dropped off his car and he joined us in ours for the tour. Although Soweto is a very poor city, we also saw some of the nicer areas, as well, such as where Ronald lives. We stopped first by a Catholic Church called the Regina Mundi  Church. This is a church where Desmond Tutu used to give sermons. We, of course, took pictures and there were some ladies set up nearby with stands of goods, so we did a little shopping. Our next stop was the Hector Pieterson Museum. This was a museum dedicated to the little boy that was killed when the school children of Soweto decided to stage a peaceful protest against a rule that was being implemented back in the 70’s that all schools were to be taught in Afrikaans. The indigenous people did not want this, as this was not their native language, but rather a Dutch-descended language introduced by Whites into the region, so they decided to protest. The elementary and junior-high school children marched from their schools up the street and to a central meeting area. This was on June 16, 1976. As they reached the central area, the police decided to open fire with live ammunition on the school children, killing a lot of them. Hector Pieterson became the face of this tragedy and has a museum dedicated in his honor and that of the other children. There is a famous image of Hector Pieterson being carried away from the police fire with his sister running beside him. If you Google Images on his name, the picture comes up. It is very sad.

From there, we went to lunch at a local place called Sakhumzi. And boy, was this local. There was a buffet lunch,  and some of the things on the menu were chakalaka (which was good and I am trying to get a recipe for – it is a shredded carrot and bean dish that is very spicy), beets, some kind of local chicken dish (where there were still feathers on some of the pieces), tripe (just, NO… look it up, it’s stomach and stomach lining) and other interesting things. Many local people there, and I got a few pictures with the local police and of the police cars, which I find amusing that they are BMW’s. We were then off to the rest of our adventure.

Next stop was a walk right up Vilakazi Street to Nelson Mandela’s old house. The famous thing about this street, other than the fact that Mandela lived here was that Desmond Tutu also lived on the same street at the same time. Mandela’s house was quite small, but I am sure of average size at the time, a three-room house. He lived there with his first wife (Evelyn, I think). They had a few children, one of whom died at 9 months old. They eventually divorced and at some point, he married Winnie. They had two girls, Zenani and Zindzi. She stayed at this address the entire time he was imprisoned and went through things such as the police driving by and firing at the house (with the children inside). The bulletholes are still on the house. We also found something interesting inside – a commendation Mandela received from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. This was the last stop on our trip to Soweto. We dropped our wonderful tour guide off and headed home for the day.

This night for dinner, we didn’t want to go back out so my brother made us salmon steaks with basmati rice and asparagus, all with garlic butter, at home. We enjoyed a nice evening in, watched some movies on television and talked. It was the perfect end to a great day.