First time in South Africa

Yes! Just after one week I’m on travel again. This time, for the first time, in South Africa, discovering a new continent. How many tales and legends and mystery fill our mind about Africa. How many things we imagine about this continent and how much of our history is in some way connected with it. I landed in Johannesburg just a few hours ago and my wonderful friend Alberto had already organized a tour of Soweto. He knew that the schedules on this trip are really tight and he imagined that I wanted to lose no time. First time you are in a place you need some time to understand it and to be able to elaborate the feelings that just looking out of the car window spontaneously raise (and the travel between airport and hotel is normally not the most representative of the country). But Soweto…
The mini bus drove us through Johannesburg downtown, a kind of ghost city on sunday at 2pm. This was the firs unusual thing. Downtown is not the most developed, modern, full of life part of the city. It’s in some way historic, it’s the history of a commercial center that during the years moved and left behind a kind of nostalgic flavor of a time that has gone. Seeing a sign  survived from the apartheid times to keep whites out of a shop make you face a part of the history that even if heard many times becomes suddenly real and terribly unconfortable.
Entering Soweto and seeing the hostels, originally built to house male migrant workers, still populated gives you a picture of what this place has been and in part still is. There are “few” slums too, “where only 5% of the population lives” said our driver. But 5% of 2.5 millions of people living in Soweto means abut 125.000. It’s Vicenza! It’s really unbelievable and so far from our standard thoughts… We are used to think that the world is the one in which we live, but there’s so much difference all around and so many people suffering that we should really stop and think a little more.
I visited the museum dedicated to the “Soweto uprising”. It was June 16th 1976,  when mass protests erupted over the government’s policy to enforce education in Afrikaans rather than English. It was June 16th when the Police opened fire in Orlando West on 10,000 students marching from Naledi High School to Orlando Stadium. It was 35 years ago, but it was the same happened last year in many countries in North Africa, it was the same happened in China. It’s the same that will happen in some new place. Why don’t we learn from the past? It’s so easy! Just look at one of the pictures of the Soweto uprising and how can you only imagine to let it happen again?