Johannesburg

Before taking the plane back to Finland, I spent one night in Johannesburg in a cozy Mbizi Backbackers with other world travelers and entire day with my friend Simphiwe and a local tourist guide Jabu, who knew the city like his own pockets and was able to answer any question concerning history, politics, society, culture, or just daily living. 

 Johannesburg with its 4,5 million population is the largest city in SA and wealthiest province having the largest economy of any metropolitan region in Sub-Saharan Africa. Next to the high society apartments although are tens of thousands of people living in slums. Nowhere in the world the slums are growing as fast as they do in Sub-Saharan Africa: 72 percent of the inhabitants of the cities live in slums and the number keeps raising increasingly. Some of the slums are acknowledged as legal area of living and have sanitation, water supply and electricity, but most of them don't.

Johannesburg is the world's largest city not situated on a river, lake or coastline. City is the source of a large-scale gold and diamond trade, due to its location on the mineral-rich Witwatersand range of hills. These days only the mines outside city are still in active use.

Apartheid museum was very mind-opening experience, which showed a series of 22 individual exhibition areas, where it was possible to walk through a dramatic emotional journey, which told the story of a state-sanctioned system based on racial discrimination and the struggle of the majority overthrow this tyranny. Temporary exhibition presented Nelson Mandela's life and inheritance to celebrate his honorable 95th birthday.

 Next to Johannesburg is Soweto, the previous apartheid regime Black area with famous Nelson Mandela home, Desmond Tutu home, Hector Pieterson Museum and many more. We spend one hour in Hector Pieterson Museum, which commemorates the 566 people who died in the student uprising that followed the Apartheid decision to compulsory use of Afrikaans in some of the subjects studied in Primary school. The museum is named after a 12-year-old boy who was the first person shot dead by police on that day, and is located near a memorial to his death.

In the middle of the Soweto city, there is Walter Sisulu Square, which celebrates and commemorates the birth of democratic South Africa by embodying the ideas and principles of the Freedom Charter: History, Symbolism, Equality, Accessibility, Vitality, Robustness, Identity, Legibility and Ecology. In the monument is written all the 10 resolutions that Nelson Mandela initiated and on which the country still is basing upon their politics.