'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Vilakazi Street, Soweto

Another picture! This is from the afternoon that Leila, our friend Emily Mnisi, Emily's friend Ria, and Ria's daughter Rudo spent driving around Soweto. I guess it was May 4. We were on the only street on the planet that has been home to TWO Nobel Peace Prize winners!

The two in question are/were Nelson Mandela, and Archbishop Tutu. The Street is:

When we were there, a gaggle of lovely boys came up and started mugging around and singing the South African national anthem in a bunch of languages-- including Afrikaans. Left to right in the pic: two of the boys, Emily, Leila, Ria, Rudo.

(Back in '76, it was a new government requirement that schoolkids study additional subjects in Afrikaans that sparked the Soweto Youth Uprising. That was then; now is now... )

Just opposite this street sign is the house that Madiba and Winnie moved into in the 1950s. After he was imprisoned, she stayed living there for a while till the authorities moved her to some out-of-the-way place. I guess in the divorce settlement she got the house, and has since turned it into a museum...

Just down the street, Tutu and his family still own the big grey house he's had here for many years, and he lives there sometimes, between his many peripatations (?) around the world.