Face to Face with Soweto

The last 2 days have been pretty intense. It's Sunday afternoon now and I'm in London England, but less than 36 hours ago I was on my way to Soweto, South Africa, the largest township in South Africa. The visit was an exercise, emotionally and physically. Then I got 3 or 4 hours of sleep while on the plane, the brand new Airbus A380, the largest passenger airplane in the world. Talk about going from one extreme to another. I went from riding a department store mountain bike around one of the poorest areas in South Africa

to riding business class on one of the most expensive civilian airplanes in the World.

Biking through Soweto:

First I have to thank our new GM of the office in South Africa; Marcus Sorour.

Marcus was a great host the whole week and organized the bike tour for us. It was something he did a year ago and was, thankfully, adamant that we do it as well. There are tours that take you through Soweto in a car or on a bus but by biking through Soweto we got to meet and interact with the people. It's a reality changing experience, I'm so thankful I got to experience.

The bike tour participants and our guides from Soweto Bike Tours

Soweto is a community of approximately 3.5 - 5 Million (by local estimates) in a place less than 60 square miles with 11 languages regularly spoken by it's members. There was a lot of what you'd expect to see in a highly dense, extremely poor, populated area. There was also a lot you wouldn't expect: namely extreme community pride and optimism. Soweto is home to two Nobel Peace Prize winners (can anyone else say that?): Desmond Tutu in 1984 and then Nelson Mandela in 1993.

There is a lot I can say and a lot of back story to the pictures but for some reason, even though they're not that great, letting the pictures talk for themselves seems more appropriate.

My biggest takeaway from the whole trip, and I plan to address this more on my other blog, is the importance of optimism and community in South Africa and that in the next 3-5 years as reliable Internet becomes available to all Africans, you will see a radical transformation there that will have an effect on the Internet, startups everywhere and therefore, the World. I'd encourage you to pay close attention to Africa, I know I will be.

This was one in a series of posts about my trip to Joburg South Africa. You can see all of those posts under the tag: Joburg.

Tags » Joburg Pic Travel Work

23 May 2010
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Face to Face with Soweto

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