Johannesburg: tips, attractions and what to visit – 11/29/2023 – Tourism

There is a street in Johannesburg that bears a title perhaps unique in the world. It is unlikely that any other house was home to two Nobel Peace Prize winners. In the case of Vilakazi Street, we are talking about political leader Nelson Mandela, who lived there in a small two-room house, and Desmond Tutu, archbishop and activist who lived a few blocks away.

It doesn’t stop there. It was on this same street that the Soweto Uprising took place in 1976, when thousands of black high school students rose up against apartheid in an act that ended with hundreds of students killed by police violence. The event helped draw international attention to South Africa’s segregationist laws, which granted rights only to whites, and helped implode the regime, which ultimately fell in 1994.

This helps to explain why Johannesburg is worth including in a South African travel itinerary. For a long time, the country’s great metropolis functioned only as a port of arrival on the continent or a starting point for safaris — the best in the country are closer to there than to Cape Town. The reputation of being violent, scattered and unattractive also scared off tourists.

But it is a fact that you cannot delve into the history of South Africa without spending time in its main city.

It all starts at the end of the 19th century, when a gigantic gold mine was discovered in the region. The ore brought an influx of people from the colonizing peoples (British, who dominated the country, and descendants of the Dutch, who were the first white people to settle there), as well as Asians
and, of course, the black natives coming from the interior, used as the main labor force.

The Babylon of peoples — even the Indian Mahatma Gandhi lived there for a while — was not well regarded by the local authorities, who soon tried to stipulate delimited areas in which each ethnic group could live, in an embryo of what would come to be institutionalized in the form of the apartheid in the 1940s.

Whites had full freedom of movement; blacks were restricted to an area in the southwest of the city, which would later be known as Soweto (acronym for “southwest township”).

It is Soweto that holds the keys to explaining the social and political trajectory of South Africa. It is recommended to hire the service of a guided tour, such as the one offered by the company Curiocity, to get to know this super neighborhood inhabited by more than 1.2 million people , living in the most diverse conditions.

For around R$287 you can go there in a group, safely, enter Mandela’s house and the Apartheid Museum and have local delicacies for lunch, with everything included in the ticket price.

Kliptown, for example, is one of its most miserable parts. A tour will show the permanence of social distortions in the country, not very different from the reality of the poorest Brazilian favelas.

There, where more than 70% of the population is unemployed, thousands live in makeshift housing, with metal walls that boil in the summer and freeze in the winter. There is no garbage collection or running water — people get their supplies from a few taps near food scraps scattered on the mud streets. Electrical energy only from cats.

A local social project, the Little Rose Centre, lives on donations to maintain a school for children
and a handful of computers for teenagers.

Still in Soweto, the Orlando West region is where Vilakazi Street is located. A memorial has been erected in honor of Hector Pieterson, a 12-year-old boy who was one of the children murdered by apartheid police during the student protest. A famous photo in which he appears loaded after being shot went around the world and led several countries to impose embargoes on South Africa.

Three blocks away is Mandela’s house, now turned into a museum. During the decades that the political leader was imprisoned for his activism against the regime, his family lived under constant surveillance by the white police. The facade contains holes from bullets fired to intimidate Winnie Mandela and the couple’s daughters.

The house that was the home of Desmond Tutu, an archbishop who was a kind of spiritual support for the black population during the years of segregation, is not open to visits, but can be seen from the outside.

The Apartheid Museum, opened in 2001, is on the way between Soweto and the central region of Johannesburg.

It brings together an impressive collection of documents, photos and videos, as well as reproductions of prison cells and armored vehicles that were used by the South African government to keep black people out of power. It also shows the long struggle for civil rights led by names like Mandela, Tutu and singer Miriam Makeba.

Right at the entrance, two doors with different notices (one for whites and one for non-whites) allow the visitor to experience the difference in rights and standards of living that were destined for the two portions of the population.

Maboneng is the neighborhood of the moment. Its name, which in Sotho means “place of light”, refers to the electrical energy that attracted the attention of people coming from remote villages to work in the mines.

In the post-apartheid years, when white people abandoned the central region of the city and built bubbles further north of the city, the area began to be occupied by black artists, in a rare case in which revitalization did not mean gentrification. The place offers a sample of contemporary production, with galleries, restaurants and shops selling clothes created by local people.

The center of Johannesburg itself, not far away, is somewhat desolate. For a long time, its art deco skyscrapers were a demonstration of the power of the country’s elite, who were trying to create an African Manhattan there. With the so-called “white flight”, the white exodus that was a consequence of the country’s democratization, the place was abandoned and can be dangerous, especially at night, when it is even emptier. Tours with local guides, therefore, are essential.

To the north, Sandton is one of the richest neighborhoods in the city and the region where the main hotels are located. In a local comparison, it would be something like the meeting between Faria Lima and Berrini, with tall mirrored buildings, restaurants, designer stores and the Johannesburg stock exchange.

The heart of the neighborhood is Mandela Square, a square surrounded by a refined shopping center, very close to the five-star hotels in the region, such as the Hotel DaVinci, which has direct access to the shopping center and a variety of
variety of culinary options.

The biggest news in the area is the luxurious The Leonardo, a 55-story building (the largest in all of sub-Saharan Africa), which mixes residential and hotel units — its presidential suites,
with almost 180º views of the city, they are usually occupied by heads of state.

At the top of it is an open-air bar that advertises itself as the highest on the entire continent. Up there, a vending machine like those that sell soft drinks is fully equipped with mini bottles of Moët & Chandon sparkling wine, a luxury that is not even found in Brazil — to attest to how Johannesburg is really based on contrasts.