Sleeping Around (33 page)

16

‘You can stay only after being screened and approved and authorised by my mum.'

Walindah Mosia, 25, Soweto, South Africa

CouchSurfing.com

My next couch-surfing host didn't live in a tin shack. Not that I was really expecting my host Walindah to live in a rundown lean-to, but the images beamed around the world of Soweto tend to only show a scruffy, littered and crowded shanty town full of rusty shacks. Then again, I also hadn't expected to find that Walindah lived in a nice brick suburban house in a nice quiet suburban street. The only stereotypical sign that I was in Soweto was Walindah's brother's car in the driveway. It had been totally trashed during a recent carjacking. ‘They put a gun to my brother's head,' Walindah said somewhat casually, as we walked up the driveway, ‘and threatened to “blow out his brain” if he didn't get out of the car.'

‘Is it, um . . . dangerous around here?' I asked a little nervously.

‘No, not at all, it didn't happen in Soweto,' Walindah explained cheerfully. ‘We feel safer in Soweto than we do in Johannesburg. They've got the highest murder rate in the world, you know.'

So you may well wonder why I chose the murder capital of the world as my next couch-surfing destination. I chose Johannesburg because, as with Belgium, I'd been there before without having seen any of it. All I had seen in my very brief previous stay was the heavily fortified hostel next to Johannesburg airport where I stayed while in transit to West Africa.

There were plenty of couch-surfing hosts to stay with in Johannesburg, but after reading a bunch of profiles I decided that I didn't want to stay in a nice white neighbourhood and eat barbecue steak in a nice white restaurant and sit in a bar surrounded by locals boasting that ‘South Africa has the best rugby team in the world'.

But I only had a short time in Johannesburg (due to a short connecting flight), so if I wanted to experience South Africa with an African South African, then Soweto, the black township southeast of Johannesburg, was the place. It wasn't easy finding a host in Soweto, though. I scoured all three websites and found only four potential hosts. But as it turned out I received a reply and a couch invitation in response to my first request—on the proviso that I had been screened, approved and authorised by my host's mum first.

Walindah gave me directions from the airport, which involved catching a bus into the city then an overcrowded taxi-bus to Soweto. My first introduction to Soweto was when my taxi-cum-bus-cum-sardine-tin pulled into the chaotic Baragwanath taxi-rank-cum-market-cum-fast-food-outlet along with hundreds of other mini-buses. The market stalls were mostly manned (or should that be womanned?) by women selling fresh fruit, vegetables, clothes and lots of plastic junk. In between the market stalls were chickens and chickens' feet being roasted on roadside barbecues while butchers were brushing away flies from sheeps' heads. There were constant clashes between the First World and the Third, as when I watched a Zulu witchdoctor sell medicines and animal skins to a man in a suit who was speaking loudly into a mobile phone.

‘I will find you,' Walindah had said in her email.

How would she ever find me in a crowded bus station? It didn't take long to figure out how. I was the only white person. Walindah, who was a petite thing and wearing a pretty bright red dress, found me within a minute of me stepping off the bus. There was a bus to Walindah's house, but I said I was happy to do the 30-minute walk—which, with a big backpack, only seemed like a good idea for the first four minutes.

Walindah was very shy and I seemed to do most of the talking. ‘There's, um, lots of people here in Soweto,' I said as we weaved our way through the crowd.

‘Yes, but no one knows how many people live in Soweto,' Walindah shrugged. ‘The government says one million, but it's more like four million. People do not want to do a census because they don't trust the government, so it is impossible to find out how many people there are.'

It was hard to hear Walindah. Not only was she softly spoken, but there was also loud, bass-heavy, tribal-type house music blaring out from shops and cars and market stalls. Walindah told me that the music is called
kwaito
, an Africanised version of hip-hop that started in Soweto and is now the most popular form of dance music on the continent.

Even every inch of space on the narrow footbridge that spanned the main road was taken up with market stalls. Well, when I say ‘stalls', I mean people sitting behind cardboard boxes. This was obviously the place to sell illegal substances and shifty-looking folk were either selling blocks of hash, dried bunches of marijuana leaves, pills or—I wonder if they smoke 'em or sniff 'em—pairs of socks.

‘That is where I work,' Walindah said, pointing across the road to a collection of large ugly buildings that looked like a rundown council estate. ‘It is Chris-Hani Baragwanath Hospital, the largest hospital in the world. There are over three thousand beds and seven thousand staff members.' Walindah was one of two thousand nurses.

‘More than two thousand patients check in to the hospital every day,' Walindah continued. ‘And over half of them are HIV-positive.'

Walindah then reeled off some stats that were just staggering. One in five people in South Africa, which has the most severe AIDS epidemic in the world, are infected with AIDS. That's more than 6 million people. Around 260 000 of them are children under sixteen.

‘There are about one thousand AIDS deaths every day,' Walindah said matter-of-factly. Although Walindah worked in the maternity ward, she still witnessed the effects of AIDS every single day—30 per cent of pregnant women in South Africa are living with HIV.

‘We only started to supply drugs to help people with AIDS two years ago,' Walindah said. ‘And this is many years after most other countries have had them.'

As we walked past the hospital entrance we had to sidestep a line of folk waiting to enter. Although we all know that you can't catch AIDS through casual contact, it was a bit unnerving just to think how likely it was that a lot of them had AIDS.

We walked in silence until we'd finally passed the last of the hospital buildings.

‘So, were you born in Soweto?' I asked Walindah.

‘Yes, and so were my mum and dad.'

Walindah was proud of being a Sowetan and as we trudged, or at least
I
trudged, through the suburbs, Walindah filled me in on the history of the ‘township'. The city of Soweto (a contraction of South Western Townships) was established in 1930 when the government decided that the black suburbs in Johannesburg were getting too close to the white suburbs. The blacks were given eviction notices and were moved to a farm 18 kilometres from the city. It doesn't sound as if they got a very good deal, though. It took the new residents of Soweto three hours to get to work because there were no roads—or shops, parks, electricity and running water. Over the next twenty years the population of Soweto exploded, with large numbers of Zulus and others driven to the city in search of work and a better way of life. The ‘better way of life' turned out to be in overcrowded slums. Eventually the municipal authorities decided that if they built 20 000 low-cost houses then they would have better control of their low-cost workers.

‘There are only two roads in and out of Soweto,' Walindah said. ‘The road was built this way to control the people. The police could just cut off the two roads and stop people moving in or out.' The locals had their own way of outsmarting the police, though. Under Apartheid Soweto didn't have street signs to make it hard for the police to know where they were.

We were now walking past the endless rows of low-cost houses and, although they were actually more like tiny brick matchboxes with a window and a door, it still wasn't how I imagined Soweto. It was a far cry from a shantytown and many of the homes had lovingly tended gardens, fresh paint jobs and satellite dishes.

Walindah's neighbourhood was much the same except with much larger homes and much larger satellite dishes.

Walindah's mum Yolanda, a robust and jolly woman, greeted us at the door (I still had to pass the final inspection before I was allowed to enter the house). Yolanda was a high-school teacher and—making me feel very old indeed— was a year younger than me. Walindah gave me a brief tour of her home, which looked pretty much identical to any average suburban home, then showed me to my room. ‘No, no I can't sleep here,' I protested. Walindah was giving me her room and she was going to sleep with her mum.

‘No, no,' she replied. ‘You are our special guest.'

There was no mention of Walindah's father, so I subtly brought him up in conversation. ‘So, where's your dad?' I asked.

‘He just . . . disappeared one day,' Walindah shrugged.

While Yolanda cooked dinner we sat on the front steps watching the passing parade of folk walking home from work or carrying bags of shopping while laughing children played football on the street.

Walindah asked me lots of questions about my life in Australia. She told me that she had hosted a few couch surfers and because she probably would never travel, it was her way of ‘seeing the world'.

‘This way I have the world coming to me,' Walindah said with a beaming smile.

Walindah's younger brother Elijah turned up just as dinner was being served. Elijah was unemployed and had been out looking for work. He was even more shy than Walindah. ‘It is hard for Elijah,' Walindah said, as we sat down for dinner. ‘Eight million people are unemployed in this country, which is almost forty per cent of the population.'

Dinner was a delicious spicy chicken stew with rice and mashed pumpkin. Nobody talked much during dinner because they were all glued to the television getting their daily fix of the soap
Egoli: Place of Gold
.

‘South Africa didn't get television until nineteen seventy-six,' Walindah said during the commercial break. The main reason for the delay was that the white minority regime saw television as a threat to Afrikaans by giving undue prominence to English. There was no undue prominence to English in
Egoli: Place of Gold
. The show was quadrilingual, and the characters would suddenly switch in mid-sentence from English to Zulu or Afrikaans to Xhosa.

‘It is a very popular show,' Walindah said. ‘There has been over four thousand episodes.'

I often feel like a linguistic dumbass when I travel, but even more so on this trip. Everyone I'd stayed with so far spoke at least two languages fluently. Walindah spoke five languages: English, Afrikaans, Setswana, Xhosa and Zulu.

Walindah and her mum sure loved watching TV. After
Egoli: Place of Gold
finished, we watched South African
Big Brother
followed by South African
Who Wants to be a Millionaire
. It was exactly like TV at home—I picked up the TV guide and was mortified to see that they also had South African versions of
Idol
,
The Weakest Link
,
Deal or No Deal
,
Temptation
and even a
Survivor South Africa
.

‘More people vote on a reality TV show than in an election,' Walindah told me proudly.

When Walindah turned over to
South Africa's Biggest Loser
I feigned a large yawn and slunk off to bed.

It really was like being at home. At 6.30 the next morning, I woke with the same startled fright that I have at the same ungodly hour in Melbourne. I never would have imagined that I'd hear the hissing and humming hydraulics of a hi-tech garbage truck as it picked up wheelie bins from the street in Soweto. The Sowetan suburbs so far seemed amazingly normal.

The loud garbage truck did bring the couch rating down a bit, though.

Couch rating: 8/10
Pro: Walindah's bed was comfortable
Con: I felt uncomfortable about stealing Walindah's bed

After breakfast, Walindah's mum said that we could borrow her car (bless her, she caught the bus to school instead). I'd timed my visit well because Walindah had a day off—and to be quite honest I was a little bit worried about the idea of wandering around the back streets of Soweto by myself.

Our tour began on a somewhat sombre note. Our first stop was the suburb of Orlando West, which is home to the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, a monument to Soweto youth named after the schoolboy shot dead in the infamous 1976 uprising. What started as a peaceful protest march by youths against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in Black Schools in Soweto escalated into bloody violence as police opened fire on 10 000 students marching from Naledi High School to Orlando Stadium. Walindah's mum was one of those students.

‘She was fourteen years old,' Walindah said, as we stood in front of a photo of terrified school kids screaming under a cloud of tear gas. ‘She got away before the police started shooting everyone.'

Inside the museum was a series of moving photographs and multimedia presentations showing the conditions that led to the student strikes and the subsequent white minority's violent reaction. The most disturbing, yet poignant, photograph was the iconic shot that sparked the world's outrage. Running through a suburban street is Mbuysia Makhubu, his face contorted by grief and disbelief, with the bloody and lifeless body of 12-year-old Hector Pieterson in his arms. Hector had been shot in the back while he scurried away towards safety. Hector was just one of 556 who were killed by the South African police.