Page 26 - David Goldblatt _ Johannessburg 1948 - 2018

SOWETO
In 1972 I was in and out of Soweto almost every day for about six months. The photography was invariably within the crowdedness and compression of matchbox houses and treeless, narrow streets. On winter days the place was enveloped in a pall of smoke and grey dust.
In the evenings I would drive back into the spaciousness and clean air of Joburg’s northern suburbs. Under the leafy canopies of thousands of trees, I would drive past houses serene in their grounds. And to the comfort of home. Nothing in my life made me more sharply aware of the power of apartheid and of what it meant to be Black or White, than this simple transition.
Every adult resident of Soweto had to accept that if they wished to work and live in Joburg, they had to reside within the strictly circumscribed borders of a proclaimed ‘Bantu’ urban area. If they were lucky enough to rent a house
in Soweto, this was a privilege, not a right, and it could
be revoked by the stroke of an official’s pen. They could never own a piece of land in Soweto or the city, or, indeed, anywhere in South Africa, unless within the ‘homeland’ perhaps hundreds of miles away, of the tribe into which they were born. That many were urbanites with no tribal roots mattered not. Their freedom to travel within the country was severely restricted by apartheid regulations.
I could live, work and move almost anywhere I wished.
These were the horizons of a Black person in Soweto and of a White from the northern suburbs of Johannesburg in 1972.
David Goldblatt