Cricket: Soul and spirit triumph in the smiles of Soweto

By RICHARD BOOCK

SOWETO - You could travel the world and not find smiles as wide or as ready as those in Soweto, where five or six million black South Africans continue to celebrate what little they have, rather than what they haven't.

Derided and scorned by more affluent neighbours in the northern suburbs, the former South West Township is a symbol of hope in this African madhouse, a place where a traveller is more likely to be assaulted by a schoolchildren's chorus of good mornings than anything more sinister.

If New Zealand were looking for a lesson in spirit before their campaign begins on Monday, they received it yesterday from a township that teems with goodwill and trust, despite the best efforts of its blinkered creators.

Soweto is a place where beauty lies simmering just under the pot-holed surface, just beyond the rows of dilapidated, semi-roofed abodes, and just around the corner from the central bus station, a vast parking lot of the most unroadworthy mini-vans in the world.

It can be found below the poverty line, beneath the recycled, garishly matched clothing of its inhabitants, and away from the sun, the smell and the sweat.

Like the group who assisted me when I was hopelessly lost yesterday morning, not only taking time out from their roadside spare-parts business to give directions, but climbing into their beaten-up old Opel and leading me to the ground.

Or the six- and seven-year-olds who were coming out of school with smiles and waves, mimicking the thumbs-up sign and calling out their greetings; and the older ones at the ground who sang and danced and embraced the event like an old friend.

White South Africans are ashamed of Soweto. They see it as blight on the landscape, a tad rich considering their own claim to fame was digging up the entire countryside.

At the hotel in plush Sandton, there wasn't a white man who could give accurate directions to the ground; they had to find someone with more "experience."

Travel books warn visitors not to enter the township alone.

And it's true that Soweto is no trendy beat. Poverty dominates, with all its inevitable consequences.

Unemployment is over 50 per cent, there is no street lighting, no security, and the local newspaper is dominated by crime stories, the worst of which yesterday involved the torture and murder of a middle-aged woman with a hot iron.

There is discontent and apathy, and if you look hard enough, all the drawbacks that mark the gathering of so many people in such hardship: crime, health, housing and so on.

But the spirit of the place is also obvious, something folk say has a lot to do with where Soweto comes from, and who was there at the start.

It was in the 1950s that the white apartheid Government decided to move the residents of Sophiatown, a rundown Johannesburg suburb that also happened to be the cradle of developing black urban culture, the home to much of the creative black African talent in the city.

There was apparently a vibe to the place, people of all races bought into the scene and it became the base for journalists, reporters and artists of Drum, the first black magazine.

Then they were all moved to Meadowlands, a characterless settlement on the far edge of the city, later to become Soweto.

It figures. If you stand still for a moment, you can almost still feel the penny whistle and the sax, the dancing and debate - the sense of soul.