South Africa's Once-Destitute Soweto Transforms

Wall Street Journal ^ | January 24, 2007 | ADAM COHEN

[MinorityRepublican]

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- It is Friday evening, and dozen Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs are parked across the street from The Rock nightclub. The crowd sports designer clothes and haircuts. Buckets of champagne top the tables, and patrons, three-deep at sleek, silver-topped bar, wave cash to buy another round.

The ritzy nightspot isn't in Los Angeles or London. It is in Soweto, a sprawling community on the outskirts of Johannesburg and a place once synonymous with extreme poverty and brutality of white rule.

Home to roughly a million people, Soweto now is sprouting nightclubs, shopping malls and modern bank branches. Roads, formerly rutted tracks of red dust, are freshly paved. Brightly painted apartment buildings have replaced metal-roof shacks. Upwardly mobile blacks are choosing to stay in Soweto instead of moving to white neighborhoods, as many did when segregation ended in the early 1990s. Some are even returning to Soweto from the white suburbs, drawn by family ties and economic opportunities.

As delegates to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, prepare to discuss how to raise living standards in southern Africa, the transformation of Soweto offers an example of how quickly an impoverished community can be turned around. The rapidly growing black middle class in this former township is adopting new lifestyles that are creating a wealth of new business opportunities for black entrepreneurs. The economic potential is vast. Soweto residents spend more than four billion rand, or $560 million, a year on retail products, according to 2004 data from the City of Johannesburg, which incorporated Soweto in 2002. But of that amount, less than 1% is actually spent in Soweto, it says. The rest is spent in other parts of Johannesburg.

Under apartheid, deprivation was systematic in Soweto and other South African "townships," where black workers were required to live.

[Southack]

Wow! Apparently crack sales at the WSJ are at record highs. This is Soweto: http://www.suedafrikatour.de/regionen/gauteng/johannesburg/soweto.htm

(and to the WSJ author, $560 Million per year for a million residents is a starvation-level $560 per person per year...not even $2 per day)

[nopardons]

Who is Adam Cohen and HOW did this piece get by the editors?

Affirmative Action is a nightmare in South Africa, with black ANC supporters being given high paying jobs, which they do NOT do, or do badly...with no reprisals. And Soweto is NOT a paradise on earth now.

[gr8eman]

OMG...the fact that anyone who would be hired by anyone to do anything could get by by being so stupid as to try to convince people that S.A. is some kind of paradise speaks volumes about what is going on in the news business these days. (Nice run-on sentence...huh!)

[American in Singapore]

Can I buy a replica used tire necklace to wear for club-going?

[reformedliberal]

But the ANC aren't communists and this article proves how capitalistic they are..............really! I know this because a progressive South African who left there 25 years ago told me so. She also told me she hasn't been back because it isn't safe. My conservative SA friend who did go back to see her mother, who cannot leave because her pension is in rands, which cannot leave the country, just cries over the ruin of her country.

This piece didn't get by anyone. It is just part of the ongoing whitewash.