Word: soweto
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
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...
Thabang Kubheka left Soweto in 1999 to work on cruise ships and returned with her savings in 2002, at 27, to open Soweto's first beauty parlor, Roots. She now 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...
...telling. In the past, successful stars or filmmakers like Vosloo or Tsotsi director Gavin Hood would have left for Los Angeles. Charlize Theron, South Africa's biggest star, never even acted at home. But Nkosi, who was cast in Peter Jackson's upcoming alien blockbuster District 9, shot in Soweto last year, says that while he's happy to act for Hollywood, he has no wish to act in it. South Africa is too exciting. "We were shut away from the world and each other for so long. But now we are getting to know each other...
...impoverished mine worker, Motlanthe came of age politically as a student activist during the Soweto uprising of 1976, and the following year was imprisoned for his role in those events. He spent ten years behind bars on Robben Island, the infamous South African prison which held so many anti-Apartheid leaders it became known as the "university of the struggle", where he joined fellow inmate Nelson Mandela in the ANC. Upon release, he became an organizer for the National Union of Mineworkers, becoming its Secretary General in 1987. A decade later, was voted into the same position...