Get off the bus!
08/05/2008 10:39  - (SA)  

Georgina Guedes

When I was at school (pre-1994), one of the black girls in my class asked everyone whether, if she had a birthday party in Soweto, the white girls would come.

Most of us stoutly said that we would, without actually discussing it with our parents, who, in those days would have been responsible for getting us there, but the invitations to the party were never forthcoming, so the real test of our intention never took place.

In the years since then, I have been to Soweto a couple of times. I have visited Aids clinics that I was writing stories about, and I was once taken to Wandi's on a press trip (every white person's most accessible Soweto adventure). But to this day, I haven't yet visited a friend there.

My husband's cousin is visiting us from Germany and we are finding ourselves, in our thirties, doing the tourism thing in our home town for the first time. Of course, a trip to Soweto is on the cards.

Girls love shopping

The part that I am looking forward to the most is the informal market outside Baragwanath Hospital. Whenever I am traveling outside of South Africa, my favourite place to visit is always the local market.

In Mozambique, we made a special journey across the bay from Inhambane to Maxixe to walk through a market town. In Thailand and Laos, the best places to see what the locals ate - not only green curry and noodles, believe me - were the town markets.

In Mozambique I bought a stack of enameled metal bowls, which are very useful in my kitchen, and some second-hand clothes that I can only imagine came from aid shipments from the United States. In Laos, I bought little herbal tablets to rub onto my skin, like soap, to make it smooth. And I won't even get started on what I bought in Thailand.

Of course, there were curry pastes and noodles, and beautiful fabrics and clothes. There were fruits I have never seen before, and probably don't want to again, considering how revolting they smelled. There were all sorts of undesirable parts of animals, and vats of strange looking river fish. Oh, and did I mention that there were clothes?

First-hand experience

Markets provide a real taste of how the people of an area live, what they eat, what they need and what they do. So it's about time that I visited a market in my own country so I can learn more about how the majority of my countrymen live.

The only experience I've had of a Soweto market - I'm not even sure it's the same one - was in the episode of Amazing Race, when Rob and Amber were recognised by one woman who knew them from Survivor, and helped on their task of buying various items to take to a children's home.

I remember thinking, "that looks like an interesting sort of place", and making a note to go there some day.

So I'm grateful to my husband's cousin (cousin-in-law?) for getting me on a tour bus to Soweto. Granted, I'm still not visiting a friend there, but I will spend a day in a town that constitutes a rich part of our cultural heritage, seeing some of the important sites and maybe learning a thing or two about my fellow South Africans.

Georgina Guedes is a freelance journalist. She knows that lots of Parisians have never been up the Eiffel Tower.

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