A journey to Soweto reveals South Africa's past and present
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Version 0 of 1. It was evening in Kliptown, a neighbourhood of Soweto. If the township as a whole has moved on and largely up in recent years, Kliptown is lagging. Children played on the rubbish-strewn railway tracks. Young men bantered and argued as they watched a scrappy game of street football. Matrons carried bags of groceries back from the rowdy market. Outside the liquor store, drinkers held cheap spirits wrapped in paper bags with a grip as secure as the chains and locks on the grills around the shop itself. It was exactly four decades since students in Soweto launched a series of protests and demonstrations that were bloodily repressed by the apartheid regime. The Soweto uprising re-energised a flagging liberation movement and set South Africans on the road to eventual freedom. So within a week of arriving as the Guardian’s recently appointed Africa correspondent, I was in Soweto, equipped with little more than a notebook and the exhilaration which comes from plunging into a new story. Not an entirely new story, as I have reported on many occasions from places across Africa over 20 years as a foreign correspondent. But most of these trips – war in Sierra Leone, football in Liberia, famine in Ethiopia, Islamic militancy in Algeria, riot and ruin in Zimbabwe, a couple of trips to South Africa itself – were fleeting. Now I live in Johannesburg. The paradox is that when you arrive with so much to learn, you also have so much to do. The first thing a correspondent needs to organise is the multiple entry resident’s journalist visa. Then come phones, data, a bank account, a home, utilities and all the rest. It is enormously time-consuming but it is also a fantastic way to start to learn about the country, and its idiosyncrasies. This was especially true of my last posting. As south Asia correspondent based in Delhi, for the first 18 months I spent two or three hours every morning simply dealing with logistics, before turning to the news. Indian bureaucracy is of course of legendary complexity – in part justifiably – and then there were the simple challenges of everyday life. Thieves repeatedly stealing the copper from wiring out the back of the apartment, for example, or the monkeys chewing through cables. So far South Africa has proved much easier, allowing more time for the other pressing task: to search out the journalists, politicians, analysts, creative artists and campaigners who matter, and make friends (and some enemies). Later will come a second wave of contacts, at a deeper level – the sources local journalists talk to. They might include campaigners who are less known but perhaps better connected; more esoteric but perhaps less politicised experts; an older generation of activists full of insight and knowledge, and a young generation well worth cultivating now; opposition politicians with time on their hands who will one day be back in power; senior (and junior) cops, spooks; the backroom dealmakers, the criminals. There are also the dozens of far-flung freelancers – the eyes and ears of the correspondent in a distant capital – to call, help, rally. Then there are all those “friends of the paper”, as my first editor called them, to look up. He was talking about a tough area of south London but these wonderful people exist everywhere. These are the individuals, sometimes influential and important but often neither, who for whatever reason feel a link with the Guardian, calling (or now sending) in tips and comments, or simply amplifying our reach. With this newspaper’s historic links to South Africa, there are more here than elsewhere. Email or WhatsApp may render the contact more rapid, but little beats a phone call. Though most are based in capital cities, it’s also important that correspondents take time to head to the provinces. So when I was in Pakistan, that meant Peshawar, the restive frontier city, and the mountains of the north; in Iraq, it was Basra and remote Anbar; in Kenya, where I travelled in July, it was Eldoret in the west and Mombasa in the east. It is often in the provincial towns or smaller cities that the reality of a country and a society lies. Borders are rarely simply those marked on a map. Within any nation there are countless other frontiers, of tribe, ethnicity, social and economic situation. Globalisation has rendered the formal borders less important, but the informal ones are as powerful as ever. One obvious pitfall in shifting from region to region is the temptation to immediately compare one with another. How can one compare Africa, all 50-plus countries, with south Asia, with its 1.6 billion people? To do so is ridiculous – and insulting to those who live in both. But some parallels can help the new arrival. A breathless western analyst recently described with horror the lack of ideological content in many election debates in democratic African countries. This is no surprise to anyone who has experienced polls in, say, Bangladesh or Nepal and who understands the role of clan, caste, tribe, ethnicity, the importance of identity, of such relations determining political allegiance. Yet how exceptional is this? “This society is so very complicated,” earnest British army officers used to complain to me in Afghanistan, as they struggled to interpret the local factional rivalries that were so important in the war. But all societies are complex – they just seem more so if you are ignorant of the dynamics that inform the choices made by individuals and communities. So I have spent a large amount of time this summer explaining Brexit and recent developments in British politics and society, where identity and tribe seem to triumph over ideology or economics as much as anywhere else. In time, of course, a deeper sense of the region you are covering as a correspondent emerges. Then you begin to understand the story, and where you went wrong early on. There is a moment when the enthusiasm and fresh eyes of the new arrival intersects with growing knowledge and comprehension of the veteran. This is when the phone calls fall into place, the ideas come fast and the words flow easily. This happy conjunction does not last forever, and when it is gone, it is time again to move on. In Soweto, I found what I like best of all: a complicated story spanning three generations of a family that plunges a reader into the past and present of a country, all while providing characters and narrative to make a steady stream of fact and observation more readable. It was the story of the siblings and relatives of Mbuyisa Makhubo, the 18-year-old seen holding a dying Hector Pieterson, 12, in his arms during the 1976 uprising. An iconic photograph of the two, taken by a local journalist, was printed around the world. The most telling paragraph in a report is often the last. A reporter makes a decision: will those final sentences be optimistic, leaving the reader upbeat, or the opposite? In this case, I opted for the former, and quoted Zongezile Makhubo, a 37-year-old nephew of Mbuyisa who still lives in Soweto, where he runs a tourism startup. “We have shown that our country unites to face the challenges,” he said. In five years perhaps, I might know if my choice was the right one. |