If Robben Island, off Cape Town, with its prison that housed Nelson Mandela for a long time, is considered a symbolic place of collective memory, the city of Johannesburg and the township of Soweto were the very historical places where South African Apartheid was born and which here expressed itself in all its violence and injustice, creating terrible social contrasts, but also the seeds of resistance, protest and political struggle, which led to the abolition of Afrikaner segregationism in 1990.
Johannesburg is still today a city of contrasts and contradictions, not only South African, but symbolically of the whole of Africa. An immense and extremely rich metropolis, the beating heart of the national economy, it was founded in the 19th century as an outpost for mining exploitation, thus the place where most of the colonial speculative interests were concentrated and, consequently, the most intransigent Anglo-Boer supremacy, to the detriment of the local populations.
It was here that Gandhi, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and, as we know, Nelson Mandela lived, all personalities who later, not by chance, became some of the world’s leading human rights activists, as they experienced the injustices of the apartheid regime at first hand. It is also no coincidence that it was in Johannesburg, or rather in Soweto, one of the main townships where black people were forcibly segregated, that the most impetuous protest movements of the entire continent broke out, violently repressed in blood.
Today, in memory of all this, some symbolic places of the historic political struggle remain, such as Nelson Mandela’s first home in Soweto, in the neighbourhood of the colourful Orlando Towers (a bungee jumping destination), a few steps away from the Hector Pieterson Museum and Memorial, a young student of just 13 years of age, killed in the streets during the student uprising of 1976. Or in Johannesburg, Gandhi’s home, Constitution Hill, where the new constitutional order was implemented at the end of segregationism, but which symbolically stands on the old colonial prison for subversives, and above all, the Apartheid Museum, which traces, with great emotional force, the dark years of South Africa, celebrating the memory of Madiba (nickname in the local language xhosa, of the leader Mandela).
Until a decade ago, Johannesburg was considered the most dangerous city in the world, struggling to rid itself of its past and its anger. Today, the redevelopment of many areas and some important social reforms, initiated with the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela as President, are finally bearing fruit and it is possible to visit its centre and the immense township of Soweto, in peace. A visit that is a must, not only because of its historical-political memory, or its modern streets and avant-garde shopping centres, but also because it represents, in contrast to the perpetuated abuses of power, the fulcrum of a spectacular naturalistic region, Gauteng, which is home to one of the most important anthropological cradles of humanity.
The Candle of Humankind, west of Johannesburg, is considered one of the most interesting palaeontological areas in the world, nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for this reason, where evocative trails lead to the fossil sites of Maropeng, the hominid cemeteries of the Sterkfontein Caves, not to mention the first gold mine, excavated by colonial pioneers in the 19th century, the Old Kromdraai Mine.
