Paved with Promise

Straddling the first and the third worlds, Johannesburg is the perfect setting for a conference on sustainable development. Founded in 1886 after an Australian prospector discovered gold, the city grew anarchically during the mining boom and then by demographic design during the apartheid years. Today, the sprawling metropolis — known to many of its inhabitants as eGoli or Gauteng, or "place of gold" in Nguni and Sotho — still contains many of the inequities that delegates meeting at this week's World Summit on Sustainable Development seek to eliminate. Mansion-filled suburbs border shanty towns and executives drive Ferraris to glass skyscrapers while Soweto coal sellers use donkeys and carts. As South Africa works to overcome its past, South Africans and visitors now have a fresh chance to examine the system that created such huge divisions.

First stop, the Apartheid Museum, which opened less than a year ago next to the Gold Reef City Casino complex just off the M1 freeway. Upon admission visitors are randomly assigned a racial classification and must enter the raw concrete and steel building through one of two doors: white or non-white.

The sense of alienation continues inside. A short film sketches the history of South Africa up to the birth of apartheid in 1948 and then the museum shows — through photos, text, video and posters — the various forms of racial segregation and repression experienced by non-whites. Blacks and whites had separate museums, galleries, sports facilities, schools.

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They could not have sex with each other, let alone marry. Disaffection eventually gives way to hope and jubilation as the exhibition shows photos and TV news clips of Nelson Mandela's release from prison and South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994.

The turning point on the road to a united South Africa was the June 16, 1976 student protest in Soweto, the large township outside Johannesburg in which blacks and "coloreds" — as people of mixed race are known — were forced to live. This momentous event is commemorated at Soweto's Hector Pieterson Museum, named for the 13-year-old boy who was the first to be killed by police when they opened fire on students, many of whom were not yet teenagers. Smaller but no less poignant than the Apartheid Museum, the Hector Pieterson Museum includes a memorial to Pieterson himself as well as a row of trees planted along the line of fire the police took 26 years ago.

Soweto itself is an energetic confusion of cardboard and tin shanties, modest brick houses that would not look out of place in a middle-class American or European suburb, and more palatial homes belonging to South Africa's new black élite. Still, compared to Johannesburg's opulent northern suburbs centered on Sandton — the city's new commercial heart and all of the city most delegates are likely to see — Soweto is poor, rowdy and sometimes dangerous, especially after dark.

But don't let that put you off. Many locals offer Soweto tours on which you can visit Nelson Mandela's house, where he lived until his arrest in 1962, and his former wife Winnie's more luxurious abode, as well a local pub or restaurant for some pap (maize porridge) and a refreshing South African beer.