 |
25 years after the uprising: Women are regaining their positions in Soweto. Slowly, life in the most famous South African township is starting to go back to normal
Pia Diaz
In the midst of the noise of computers and groups of young people retrieving their electronic mail from their hotmail addresses, Wisani Sambo, 18 years old, looks to see if anyone needs help. She is one of the voluntary workers of the Villa Digital of Soweto, an entity largely financed by Microsoft and one of the few computer centres in the area. "I am doing a computer course at a technicon and I hope to be able to create computer programmes one day. I don't know what happened on the 16th June 1976. The truth is that I don't like to hold myself back by thinking of the past but prefer to concentrate on the future", she said.
On the 16th of June Youth Day was celebrated in South Africa, and it is a national holiday. The date commemorates the day on which some twenty thousand school pupils decided to march in protest against the imposing of the Afrikaans language in schools and thereby ignited a movement that culminated in the freedom of Nelson Mandela in 1992 and the obtaining of voting rights for the Black population in 1994.
No place has more political history and has generated more myths than Soweto, the main township in South Africa. Soweto has always been considered the heart of urban life of the Black population. But the women of today have exchanged their politics for economic aspirations.
Wisani Sambo was born in Soweto and her parents and aunts and uncles were involved in the protests of the seventies and eighties. But this is not of great importance for Wisani, who does not tire of telling the youth who arrive at the Villa that the future and the possibility of work lies in computing. With a studied American accent, Wisani explains that the first democratic elections of 1994 were more important than the student uprising of the seventies. "It is democracy that enables me to study whatever I want, thinking of the past only makes me bitter", she says.
Wisani represents the new young and educated woman of Soweto. 8,4 percent of the women manage to reach the level of higher education in this area, on a level that is similar to that achieved by men. Nevertheless, in the poorer sectors 31 percent of the women have no type of education or only completed the fourth year of primary school.
Soweto is the abbreviation for "South West Township", a name given to this sector situated 15 kilometres South-West of Johannesburg in 1964. At the time of the 1976 protests Soweto had no electricity, no surfaced roads and very few houses had running water. This reality began to change in the eighties but Soweto is still a bastion of poverty. An extensive study on the reality of Soweto carried out by the University of the Witwatersrand, one of the most prestigious institutions of secondary education in South Africa, determined that 60 per cent of the families out of a million Soweto inhabitants live on less than 1.500 Rands (187 dollars) per month. Each family is on average made up of six members.
Statistically Soweto is balanced in terms of sex: 51,8% of the population is feminine and 48,2% is masculine. According to sociologists this shows to what extent Soweto has converted into a stable and urban place. The main reason for there being more women than men is due to their higher life expectancy. The most common family type is the combined family, in other words both parents and their children, representing 45,7% of the families surveyed. It is interesting to note that 63% of the combined families live in a room constructed in the back yard of another building which affects the quality of life of the family.
The importance of being a woman
But a quarter of all the houses in Soweto have a single woman as head of family, whether it is for personal reasons or due to desertion by their partners. What is surprising is that almost one out of every five homes - occupied by people with a higher income - is headed by a single mother and her children. "Clearly families headed by women is not just a characteristic of poorer areas", concluded the report of the University of Witwatersrand.
In general the economic contribution of the woman is extremely important. In almost one out of three homes in Soweto a woman brings in the main income of the family. While the families that mainly or only depend on the income of women are amongst the poorest -as the income of a woman is lower than a man - 28,8% of the heads of family live in clean homes, and these are situated in the sector with the most resources of Soweto. "This suggests that in Soweto the woman has in her own right become an important factor of urban middle class", adds the university report.
43.4% of the women are married, of them four out of ten had their first child before reaching the age of twenty and three quarters of the women had their first child around the age of 24. But almost 40 percent of all the women surveyed had their first child before the age of twenty, which shows a strong tendency to have the first child prior to marriage. Of the women married, whether in civil, religious ceremonies or according to common law, 91.6% of all them took place with lobola, a sum that is negotiated between the parents of the future couple as a "price' for the girl.
The importance that the woman has acquired as family provider also influences the perception between young people on the importance of the feminine sex in society. But in Soweto it is still the girls who help with the housework, in accordance with a survey carried out by the Community Agency for Social Enquiries (CASE). The youth survey showed that in urban centres the roles between male and female children are much more equal than in past generations and much more advanced than in the rural sectors, where, for instance, polygamy is still well regarded.
For this reason the discontent between the young of Soweto is the same between the youth of both sexes. With 60 percent unemployment and a high possibility of catching AIDS, hope is a scarce thing. Seven years after having gained democracy, expectations have in a short time lead to disillusion. In the last provincial elections, only twenty-five percent of the youth aged between 18 and 29 years exercised their right of vote.
Sandile Tashazibane, 16 years old, does not know if one day he will be interested in voting and has not studied the history of the freedom movement of his town. "It is not worth living in the past. We Blacks and Whites have to forget the past and begin something new," he says. Sandile dreams of becoming a famous kwaito singer, a musical movement which came into being with the arrival of democracy in Soweto and which today occupies the top position of the youth music rankings amongst the Black population. "Politicians and politics are boring", he comments.
The surveys also show that 25 percent of the Soweto population is less than fifteen years of age. The school-going population is stable which implies that the construction of more schools - which increased dramatically in the eighties - must now expand in order to accommodate those who still do not go to school. But a look at the school which Sandile Tshazibane attends shows that much still needs to be done, for the windows are broken, the gymnasium burnt and bullet holes are evident in some walls. The shells have not remained encrusted there since the seventies, but as a result of three armed incidents that the students were involved in last year.
The violence that 25 years ago was the expression of rebellion now terrorises the whole of South Africa, and in particular the inhabitants of Soweto.
"The protests of June 1976 took everyone by surprise, even the students who took part in them. But many people today are not proud of this act of defiance before what was at that time the all-powerful Apartheid government. Some believe that they wasted their youth for nothing", says Dumisani Ntshangase, co-author of the book "Soweto, 16th June 1976", a large collection of interviews of people who took part in the protests and which was launched in June 2001.
"The second march, which took place in August 1976, was not carried out solely by high school students but by a large part of the Soweto population that went out onto the streets. The situation became ungovernable and many students were locked up. For three years there was practically no high school education in Soweto. Unwanted pregnancies amongst adolescents increased, alcoholism increased. And the sons of this generation that lived during this terrifying decade - because from the start of the protests no-one was safe in Soweto - are those who attack us today", confirmed Ntshangase.
"But without these marches the Black population would not have regained confidence. Soweto 1976 showed us that we could win. And it gave the final push towards the destruction of the image of the White regime", added Ntshangase.
And without the 1976 events in Soweto, Wisani Sambo would probably not have been able to study computer technology.
Pia Diaz is a Chilean journalist who resides in Johannesburg, South
Africa. She acts as a correspondent for the Chilean newspaper "El
Mercurio" as well as for the Spanish newspaper "El Pais".