Soweto – which stands for South Western Townships – is home to more than 1.2 million people (Statistics South Africa, 2011). Located to the south west of Johannesburg’s city centre, the first township of Orlando was established in the 1930s to house Black workers employed in the city, including those working in the gold mines. Black workers were not allowed to live in the same areas as their white employers due to the racial segregation enacted by the apartheid government through the Native Urban Areas Act of 1923. From the 1930s onwards, city authorities forcibly removed Black African residents from the southern suburbs of Johannesburg and relocated them to the townships making up Soweto.
Over the last three decades, Soweto has become more diverse. Some parts now serve as images of the “new South Africa”: pretty brick houses with nicely kept front gardens, suburban gems owned by the emerging Black middle class. Alongside this, however, stand informal settlements of shacks built out of anything and everything, without running water or electricity, next to mountains of waste – that is also Soweto. Most of the participants of KNOW MY STORY live in parts of Soweto that are somewhere in between these extremes; their homes are associated with the infamous “matchbox” houses, now run-down and too small to host the extended families that typically form a household in working class Black communities. Many houses have been expanded over the years, with additional rooms or standalone shacks for family or renters crowding the yards. Some of the KNOW MY STORY participants rent shacks while others live in the main house of one of these properties, usually owned by an older family member. The houses have running (cold) water and electricity. The toilets and a large washing sink are usually outside, but there are no showers or baths.
Home to many prominent South African activists – including Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu – Soweto is associated with the continued struggle against injustice, including its pivotal role in the struggle against the apartheid regime. In 1976, students rose up against a law that would make Afrikaans – the language of the white ruling class – the language of instruction in schools. The violent response by the government left hundreds of young people injured or dead. In his foreword to Peter Magubane’s Soweto: Portrait of a City, Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1990) wrote of the township:
In Soweto, most sex work takes place in the backrooms of legal taverns and illicit “shebeens.” Some sex workers take clients to their own shacks or go with the client to his home while others work in hotels or bars. According to the sex workers who took part in my ethnographic study, the price for sex in taverns and shebeens is around R50 (US $4), whereas sex workers
Soweto happened almost by default, an eyesore that had not been planned; it just grew in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, with row upon monotonous row of so-called ‘matchbox’ houses crowding into unpaved streets that were badly lit. (p.4) 20