#Soweto

Last Saturday Thorsten and I went to a launch of Eve Fairbanks’ new book, The Inheritors, at the Soweto Book Café. I was excited because: 1) Eve and I have been friends for years and I was keen to hear some discussion about her award-winning book, which tells the story of modern South Africa in a very unique way; and 2) I had never been to, or even heard of, the Soweto Book Café (SBC), but I had a feeling it was something special. And it was.

Last Saturday afternoon I stood on Mbolekwa Street in Dlamini, Soweto, with a couple of hundred other spectators, watching teenage boys spinning around on super-long, low-slung bicycles. Most of the bikes didn’t have brakes, or even seats in some cases. The bikes were almost double the length of normal bicycles and their back tires were wrapped in cut-up plastic bottles.

In my recent post about the Chilli Pepper restaurant, I briefly referred to a mine dump at the end of Immink Drive in Diepkloof, Soweto.

Like many Joburgers, I’ve always been both fascinated and appalled by these mountains of golden waste. Mine dumps are massive monuments to human greed, reminders of a time when insatiable hunger for gold drove powerful men to empty the earth beneath Johannesburg, pile it up where it didn’t belong, then leave that poisoned earth to blow dust into the lungs of former mine workers who – like the mine waste itself – got tossed away like garbage once they were no longer useful to the money-making machine.

Due to poor planning, I probably won’t have time to visit a roadhouse in March. But if you’re eagerly awaiting the next installment in my Roadhouses of Gauteng series, the Chilli Pepper Restaurant on Immink Drive in Diepkloof, Soweto, is a great substitute.