Hotels, shopping malls come to South Africa’s changing Soweto
SOWETO — Giant black-and-white photos of a young Nelson Mandela smile across the broad halls of a four-star star hotel, looking over the dusty street market where he once hid from apartheid police. This is the new Soweto, a mix of upper-crust comforts and urban grit, where shopping malls and landscaped parks have sprung up among some of South Africa’s most important landmarks of the struggle against white-minority rule. It’s a side of Johannesburg that residents hope World Cup visitors will venture out to see, where one third of the city’s 3.8 million people live. “In the past, you would be ashamed of saying you come from Soweto — first of all because it was associated with crime... shantytowns and poverty. But now it has improved,” said Frans Malotle, a 48-year-old businessman.... MORE Source: The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100331com3.html |
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