Joburg Gets It Together

Volunteers create a park around Orlando Stadium in a single day. Joburg city bosses claim greenery helps redress inequality and cut crime.

PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME BY BENEDICTE KURZEN / VII MENTOR

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Fixing Joburg means reuniting it. Mayor Amos Masondo's plan for "ensuring sustainable shared growth that benefits all" aims to do just that. And he has had some success. Businesses and restaurants have returned to the inner city, encouraged by new infrastructure projects like the Newtown Cultural Precinct, and crime is off its peak since the installation of hundreds of security cameras.

His 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.

But in other areas, progress has been slow. In 2005, Masondo announced that by 2009 he planned to rehouse all 215,000 families living in shacks. That deadline has passed, but the shantytowns are not gone. In May 2008 they erupted in riots that killed 62 people and displaced 100,000.

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 one."

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 in 2007 with an ambition that it should be equal to any in the world. "Soweto has become this wonderful opportunity," he says. "It's becoming safer. Property prices are going up. Life is becoming just normal."

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 to heal.