My mother tells me the house where I was born in the Chiawelo section of Soweto in 1973 didn’t have windows, doors or a paved floor when they moved in. My father earned very little as a cleaner at the post office and had no money to fix it.

So my mother and her friends would go to a nearby farm to steal cow dung to make the floor. One day she got bitten by the farmer’s dog. That scar of poverty is still engraved on her hand like an ugly tattoo.

To someone like me born at the height of South African apartheid, the vast Soweto area of Johannesburg – created by the white government in the 1930s to keep blacks away from white suburbs – symbolises the politics of poverty and segregation, the struggle for democracy and the spiritual emptiness of my country at that time.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protests in Soweto in August 1976. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

But the Soweto the South African government tries to sell to the rest of the world – typified by the gentrification of Vilakazi Street, where I grew up after we moved from Chiawelo – tries too hard to hide the scars of its cruel apartheid history.

This new Soweto is a place where the designer-clad patrons of the area’s many bars arrive in fancy cars and drink Moet & Chandon champagne while chatting on their smartphones. It is fast catching up with Cape Town’s Long Street, Durban’s Florida Road or Johannesburg’s own Braamfontein or Maboneng as the preferred buzz location for tourists and locals with money.

Q&A What is South African cities week? Show Hide Twenty-five years after the fall of the brutal apartheid regime, South Africa's cities remain hugely divided, both economically and racially. This week Guardian Cities explores the incredible changes taking place, the challenges faced and the projects that bring hope. Africa correspondent Jason Burke reports from the Flats, where violence and death are endemic just miles from Cape Town's spectacular beaches and trendy cafes. Author Niq Mhlongo pens a love letter to the "other Soweto", one that visitors to gentrified Vilakazi Street never see. We hear from Port Elizabeth, where one architect is using recycled materials to transform his city, and Durban, where a surf school is changing the lives of vulnerable children. We explore the deadly underground world of zama zama gold miners operating illegally under the city of Johannesburg, visit the Afrikaner-only town of Orania and publish an extraordinary photo essay by Magnum nominee Lindokuhle Sobekwa, who documents life in a formerly white-dominated area where his mother once worked as a domestic helper. Nick Van Mead

Before the fall of apartheid in 1994 no one seemed to care that this corner of Johannesburg was the only street in the world where two Nobel prize winners once lived – former president Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. (Pan Africanist Congress president “Uncle” Zeph Mothopeng and ANC stalwart Tata Walter Sisulu lived nearby.)



Today Mandela’s old house is a national museum and the stretch of concrete outside is filled with overpriced vendor stalls. Most of the Airbnbs and restaurants selling expensive beer were residential homes in the 1990s.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Box Shop cafe in Vilakazi Street. Photograph: AFP Contributor/AFP/Getty Images

The locals are self-employed as car guards, tourist guides, dancers and singers for tourists, and they seem to have that spirit of ubuntu, the African philosophy of compassion, humanity, goodness and kindness.



This Soweto is safe and under constant police patrol. It is a Soweto without borders or xenophobia, and where you are just as likely to hear Mandarin as Shona, or French as KiSwahili. You are unlikely to see children with underfed bellies or drug addicts here. But Vilakazi Street’s forced and fake identity as an ideal “rainbow nation” (to quote Tutu and Mandela) doesn’t feel like the rest of the township.

The other Soweto

The other Soweto is revealed when you climb the 49 steps of Oppenheimer Tower to get a panoramic view of the whole district – separated from downtown by a string of old gold mine dumps that young people often mistake for mountains. It is home to 1.3 million people, a quarter of the city of Johannesburg.

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This other Soweto is modern and sophisticated in places, but also blighted by poverty, unemployment, drug addiction and crime. Poverty can be seen in the dirty rusted roofs of the Kliptown squatter camp to the south-east and the Jabulani hostel below, built as dormitory accommodation for migrant black workers in the 1950s. Down the street you might see police chasing a stolen car, or a crowd that has gathered around a victim of mob justice. Addicts of the notorious cheap drug nyaope – a cocktail of low-grade heroin, cannabis and sometimes anti-retroviral drugs or rat poison – are everywhere: in parks, at the traffic lights, outside shops.

Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, the exclusively black township of Soweto was a communal place fighting a common enemy – apartheid. The enemy was white, and came to the township in police vans and Casspir armoured vehicles.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Casspirs patrol the streets of a township before the nation’s first democratic election. Photograph: Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Under apartheid’s divide-and-rule policy, black people forcibly moved to Soweto were made to live according to their Zulu, Pedi, Shangani, Swati, Venda, Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho and Ndebele ethnic group. If you belonged to a Shangani ethnic group, for instance, you could only live in Chiawelo, Pimville Zone 5 or Meadowlands Zone 10. If you belonged to Sotho or Tswana, your section would be Mapetla or Phiri. If you were Zulu, you were designated to live in Dube, Zola, Endeni or Dobsonville. This apartheid design made sure people hated one another and perpetuated ethnic stereotypes, making it difficult for the township to rise and fight together. The 49 Oppenheimer steps represent the 49 sections.



Venturing into the section of another ethnic group as a child could be dangerous. There were only three swimming pools for a population of more than a million. Our nearest was in Senaoane, a designated Zulu area. I can still remember every detail of an incident in the late 80s when some bullies from a different section stole our clothes while were swimming and we had to walk home wearing only our underwear. I can see it now just as clearly as if it were on a reel of cinema film.

Still, I miss the place I lived in 25 years ago. On Sunday mornings I would be woken by the Methodist church choir singing hymns opposite Orlando West high school. I used to walk along the street every morning to buy cheap fat cakes, liver spread, polony slices and salty snoek fish. In this highly politically-minded place a stranger might greet me according to their political affiliations: “tower” for the Black Consciousness Movement and Azapo, “comrade” for the ANC, and “MoAfrica” for the PAC.



I would cross Khumalo Street to buy bread for breakfast from the shop there, before it was transformed into the swanky Kwa Lichaba restaurant and bar.



That was then. So radical is the change that looking at my neighbourhood today, you’re bound to believe that all the negative associations are totally misplaced. In areas like Vilakazi Street, the name Soweto no longer conjures up images of squatter camps, dusty roads, black smoke, crime, poverty, apartheid and ugliness.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Young people kneel in front of the police in Soweto on 16 June 1976, the day schoolboy Hector Pieterson was killed. Photograph: Foto24/Getty Images

New sections with bigger houses and yards – such as Protea Glen, Snake Park and Bram Fischer – have been added to the growing township. People have extended or changed the uniform four-roomed shapes of the apartheid houses to accommodate more family members. All the streets of Soweto are paved and there is electricity for every house, even for the squatter camps in some sections. You no longer have to be Zulu to live in Zola, or Xhosa to live in Emdeni. House price growth in Soweto regularly outstrips the rest of Johannesburg.

This new Soweto feels like a city in its own right and commands a level of respect. Before 1994 there wasn’t a single shopping mall here, but there are now more than 30. We have a reliable bus rapid transit system, Uber and minibus taxis, and trains operating every day.

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The state of the art Soweto Theatre is our cultural heartbeat, hosting drama, music and dance productions, as well as festivals, conferences and community gatherings. The two disused cooling towers that used to be part of a coal-fired power station are today one of the most distinctive symbols of Soweto, with a popular shisa nyama restaurant at the base. You can bungee jump from the top.

Visitors can get a better look at the township now than ever before. You can sleep at the Soweto Hotel or several B&Bs in the neighbourhood, or go on bicycle tours run by locals. There are walks along the Soweto heritage trail, as well as quad biking, tuk-tuk trips and street soccer sessions. Apartheid Soweto didn’t have a formal brewery, and home brews such as umqombothi were illegal, but today we have the Ubuntu Kraal Brewery, home of Soweto Gold, Orlando Stout and 76 Jameson, released to mark the 1976 Soweto students’ uprising.



All these things tickle my pride as a Soweto resident but gentrified Vilakazi Street doesn’t come close to communicating the complete, complex experience of the township. To me, Soweto is like a beautifully written novel with a great plot sitting on your bookshelf, waiting to be read and enjoyed. I feel like people who only go to Vilakazi Street and think they’ve explored the place are like those who only read the blurb of a book and think they have enjoyed the whole story.

Niq Mhlongo has lived his whole life in Soweto. He is the author of Dog Eat Dog, Way Back Home and Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree

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