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Even as public outrage boils up over the infidelity of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Nevada Senator John Ensign, millions of Americans are sneaking online to do some surreptitious cheating of their own. (See the top iPhone applications...
...biggest job is the city's biggest township. Soweto is an acronym for South Western Townships, the banal moniker apartheid-era leaders bestowed on the dormitory city they created for blacks on the edge of town. The apartheid government decided blacks had no need for not only freedom, fair wages and a decent education but also roads, trees and houses. Soweto was a place of tin shacks and red dirt. As part of the effort to redress this legacy of inequality, the mayor has repaved Soweto's main roads, and Williamson invented his extreme park missions...
Lately, the pace of transformation has been picking up, and the World Cup is one of the reasons. In 2004, South Africa won the contest to host the 2010 soccer championships, ushering in a $10 billion national infrastructure upgrade. In Joburg, that includes an underground train linking the city to a new airport, roads, a rapid bus system and two rehabbed stadiums. Most of the improvements were already planned, but as Williamson says, the Cup meant "a five-year plan became a two-year...
Just as crucial as how the government is changing Soweto is how Soweto is changing itself. Soweto is the crucible of South Africa's growing black middle class, a status that comes as no surprise: as the place where the uprisings that eventually overthrew apartheid began and as the former home of Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the township has long been at the forefront of change. Today shacks are being replaced by houses. Bars, restaurants and hotels are thriving. BMWs and Mercedeses clog the streets. Richard Maponya opened the glass-and-steel Maponya Mall on Soweto's main highway...
...operates nine of them. "Soweto was notorious, a place where people killed each other, stabbed each other," she says. "Now people even come here from Sandton [a rich Joburg suburb]. The city is getting to know itself again. We're becoming one place again." When the world converges on South Africa for the World Cup next year, it will, officials hope, find a city, and a country, finally beginning to heal...