A Dutch Colleague Asked to See the Real Johannesburg, and I Realised I Had Never Seen It Either

The question I could not answer

Marieke flew in from Utrecht for a two week project handover, and on her second evening, over a plate of pap and chakalaka she attacked with the enthusiasm of a woman who had done her reading, she asked me a simple question. She wanted to see Soweto. Not the airport version of South Africa, not the winelands, not Camps Bay where I had already taken her because it is easy and it photographs well. She wanted to understand where the country actually turned.

And I sat there, thirty-four years old, born and raised in Cape Town, with a matric certificate that had taught me the dates of 1976 and a university degree that had never once required me to walk the streets those dates happened on, and I realised I had nothing to offer her. I had never been to Soweto. I had lived my whole life a two hour flight away from the single most consequential township in my country's history and I had treated it like a headline rather than a place.

I did not tell her that. I said, of course, let me sort something out. Then I went back to my hotel room in Sandton and felt a hot, uncomfortable shame that I could not quite name.

The distance I had kept without noticing

Here is the thing about growing up white and comfortable in Cape Town. The geography does your avoiding for you. You do not have to decide to stay away from anything. The mountains and the highways and the price of houses arrange your life so that you can go from birth to your thirties inside a bubble and never once feel the edge of it. Soweto, for me, had always been something that happened on the news, a word attached to struggle and to a museum I told myself I would visit one day.

Marieke, a foreigner, had done more thinking about my country's past in her flight over than I had done in a decade. She knew about the student uprising. She knew the name Hector Pieterson. She had questions I could not answer, and every unanswered question was a small mirror.

So I did what I should have done years earlier. I stopped treating Soweto as an idea and started treating it as a place I could actually go to, with someone who lived there and knew it.

Booking it, and my own nerves

I will admit my nerves. Some of them were the ordinary anxieties a sheltered person carries, the ones I am not proud of and had absorbed without examining. And some of them were more honest, a worry that I would show up as exactly the kind of tourist who gawks and leaves, that my presence would be a kind of intrusion.

I looked into a few of the Soweto Tours run by people who are actually from the area, because it mattered to me that whoever showed us around was telling their own story and not a script written for visitors. That distinction turned out to be everything. There is a difference between being driven past a place and being walked through it by someone whose grandmother still lives around the corner.

Marieke, for her part, was simply excited in the clean way that people are when they have no baggage to unpack. I envied her that. She got to be curious. I had to be curious and ashamed at the same time.

The day itself

Our guide met us on a bright, cold Highveld morning, the kind where the light is so sharp it makes everything look freshly painted. He was funny, which I had not expected. I think I had braced for solemnity, for a day of being lectured about my privilege, and instead I got a man who cracked jokes about his neighbours and then, without any change in tone, stopped in front of a house and told us something that put a lump in my throat.

We walked down Vilakazi Street. He showed us where two Nobel laureates had lived on the same road, a fact so improbable that Marieke made him repeat it. We stood at the memorial for the children who died in 1976, and our guide told us about it not as history but as family, because for him it was. I watched Marieke listen and I watched myself learn, at thirty-four, things I should have carried my whole life.

What struck me most was how ordinary and alive it all was. I think part of my avoidance had been an unconscious idea of Soweto as a place of only suffering, frozen in the photographs I had seen. But it is a place where people are getting married and grilling meat and arguing about football and raising children and running businesses. A whole enormous living town, and I had reduced it to a single tragic image in my head.

What Marieke saw that I had missed

At one point we sat and ate, and a group of kids were kicking a ball in the street, and Marieke turned to me and said something I have thought about ever since. She said it must be wonderful to come from a country with this much story in it. This much story. She meant it as a compliment to my home, and it landed on me like a gentle accusation, because I had spent my life treating that story as someone else's to carry.

I had come on the Soweto Tour thinking I was doing a favour for a visiting colleague. By the middle of the afternoon I understood that she had done a far larger favour for me. She had asked the question that my whole comfortable life had been arranged to help me avoid.

Driving back a slightly different person

On the drive back to Sandton, Marieke fell asleep against the window, full of pap and history and the particular tiredness of a day spent feeling things. I drove in silence and did a quiet accounting of myself.

I am not going to pretend one day undid three decades. That would be its own kind of self-flattery, the tourist who visits once and declares himself changed. But something did shift, and it has not shifted back. I stopped being able to say that Soweto was a place I did not know. I had walked its streets. I had met people who lived there. I had listened to a man tell me his family's story in the place it happened, and I could no longer pretend the past belonged to other people.

When my sister visited from London a few months later and asked me, half joking, what there was to do in Johannesburg besides shopping malls, I did not hesitate. I told her about the Tours To Soweto and I said, with a conviction that surprised her, that it was the single most important day I had spent in that city. She looked at me as though I had grown a second head. The old me would have taken her to a mall.

What I carry now

Marieke has been back in Utrecht for over a year. We still message. She sends me photographs of the memorial that she printed and framed for her flat, and every time she does, I feel that small, useful shame again, the good kind, the kind that keeps you honest.

I do not think you can fully understand a country you have chosen to see only from a comfortable distance. I had a whole set of opinions about South Africa that I had formed without ever standing in half of it. It took a woman from another continent, asking to see the real thing, to walk me into a part of my own home I had spent my life avoiding.

I am grateful she asked. I am a little ashamed it took her asking. And I have promised myself I will not need a foreigner's curiosity to see my own country ever again.