Nov. 23, 2010
The Vanderbilt men’s and women’s tennis teams are in the midst of a week-long South African adventure. Charlie Jones updates us with their trip to Soweto and the Hector Pieterson Museum. Check back with vucommodores.com for more updates from the trip.
Greetings from Johannesburg!
Unfortunately, the day’s tennis events were a wash. We were scheduled to play a South African team in Pretoria, located about an hour from Johannesburg, this afternoon and then join them in a sheep roast afterwards, but the weather did not cooperate and we were forced to cancel. As the rain came down, our coaches put on an informal question/answer session with the South African players about college tennis in the United States. Many of them are currently trying to decide whether to try their hand professionally or head to an American university to play. Hopefully, if nothing else, we were able to make that decision a little easier by emphasizing the fun of a team environment and the value of a college degree.
The afternoon may have provided some disappointment for those involved, but the morning’s experiences had already offered something of much greater importance. We headed toward downtown Johannesburg at around 8 a.m., fighting the morning traffic and knowing only that we were scheduled to see a place called Soweto. As we neared our destination, the bus pulled over to pick up our tour guide for the morning, the charismatic Mr. Eric. Mr. Eric was about to show us the community he called home, a place that just over three decades earlier had been the turning point in the struggle to liberate South Africa. Mr. Eric was about to provide us with perspective.
Soweto is a black urban township within metropolitan Johannesburg and is home to over one million people. A product of segregation, the area has suffered historically from unemployment and overpopulation. As we drove through Soweto we saw the shantytowns and crumbled infrastructure. Uncomfortably, we observed a way of life so foreign to our own that it felt scarcely more real than a movie. But Mr. Eric provided context. Soweto, he told us, is home to the largest hospital in the world. It boasts five shopping malls and has recently undergone massive development projects to improve the quality of housing and add greenery to the landscape. Soweto, he said proudly, was taking a communal interest in bettering itself. As we exited the bus and entered Freedom Square, we gathered around the Freedom Charter Monument. The stone memorial is inscribed with the 1955 Freedom Charter, the vision of 3,000 representatives of anti-apartheid resistance groups. Its ten pillars of humanity were a striking reminder of the magnitude of what we, as Americans, take for granted. Such commonsensical ideas as peace and friendship and education were here enshrined as a reminder of just how far South Africa has come and the direction in which it continues to move.
We soberly continued on with our tour of Soweto, stopping next at the Regina Mundi Catholic Church. As we entered, the stained glass windows and beautifully intricate alter did well to divert our attention from the bullet hole-adorned walls. Our guide in the church, however, drew our attention to them and gave us our first taste of the Soweto uprising. It was here that 5,000 students had found shelter on June 16, 1976 as police fired upon them. They had been protesting the apartheid government’s imposition of the teaching of the language of Afrikaans in all schools. No one was killed that day in the church, but 23 people lost their lives outside its sanctuary and hundreds more would later die in the uprisings, the first of whom was 12 year old Hector Pieterson, the namesake of the museum we would later visit.
Before finishing the morning at the museum, we stopped on the famous Vilakazi Street to see the homes of two Nobel Peace Prize Laureates and international political and cultural icons, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. The outside of Mandela’s home, now a museum, bears the scars of bullet holes and bomb attacks. The very modest confines are riddled with pictures and plaques providing a glimpse of the danger into which Mandela threw himself. One wall featured a picture of his first wife, Winnie, ornamented with Nelson Mandela’s own words: “The wife of a freedom fighter is often like a widow.” Knowing him only as a symbol of peace, experiencing Mandela in this way was breathtaking. Today he may stand for peace, but I know now that he had to fight every day for his right to stand at all.
Our final destination of the morning was the Hector Pieterson Museum commemorating the Soweto uprising. We were given an hour to wander around and look at the video footage and black and white photographs. I was struck immediately by how easily the museum could have been built to commemorate the American Civil Rights Movement. The photos depicted throngs of people resisting police forces and military units. Their faces were twisted in anger or agony, or both, and as I saw their struggle to be free of oppression I realized just exactly why we were given this opportunity to visit this country. As Americans, perspective is often hard to come by. We bicker about irrelevancies and label each other, oftentimes losing sight of just how truly democratic the mere concept of argument is. South Africa has come a long way in the past half-century, but it still has far to go. We are not unlike South Africa in this regard, and in many ways it is a microcosm of the world itself. There is tension still, but when we look at South Africa with perspective we see that it is possible to be more than a member of a race or an ethnicity or a political party; it is possible to share in our common bonds as people. It is possible simply to be a member of humanity.
