Well, I know I wouldn’t, any more than I would scale the north face of Mount Mulanje (see last week’s Borderlands chapter preview on Malawi). But if bungee-jumping is what you do for thrills or fun, the twin cooling towers of the Orlando Power Station in Johannesburg offer a spectacular and colorful place to do it.
I’m happy to share my full-color photo of the towers here. It will be in the Johannesburg chapter of the book, although unfortunately in black-and-white (that’s a cost issue).
It tells you something about how South Africa has changed since the end of apartheid that the Orlando cooling towers and other sites in the townships of Soweto are now on the tourist bus routes. Soweto (derived from the acronym for Southwestern Townships) came to world attention on June 16, 1976 when mass protests erupted over the government's policy of enforcing Afrikaans as the only language of instruction in schools. Police opened fire on 10,000 secondary school students marching from a high school to a stadium in Orlando West. Official reports claimed 23 people were killed, but most historians put the death toll at 176 or higher. Worldwide reaction increased pressure for economic sanctions against South Africa. Some historians regard the Soweto massacre as the beginning of the end for apartheid.
In 1976, Soweto was an urban slum. Blacks lived in small block and brick houses or in one or two-room shacks with leaky metal roofs—hot in summer, draughty in winter. Many did not have electricity or gas; families cooked and heated with wood and children did their homework by oil lamps. The Orlando power station belched smoke over the townships, but the electricity went east to Johannesburg’s businesses, factories and white, middle-class suburbs.
Soweto today is economically and socially mixed. Most of the shacks have gone, replaced by public housing. There are middle-class districts with ranch-style homes, well-tended lawns, hotels, and bed-and-breakfasts. Soweto has parks, shopping malls and two massive sports stadiums—Soccer City and Orlando Stadium—built for the 2010 World Cup.
The coal-fired power plant was commissioned after World War II to help meet Johannesburg’s growing electricity needs. After it was closed in 1998, artists were commissioned to paint murals depicting the social and cultural life of the townships on the towers. They offer a welcome splash of color in a landscape that is for some months various shades of brown. The towers have been featured in action sequences in movies and TV series. For a fee, you can bungee jump from the walkway between them, or down into one of them. You, not me.
Postcards from the Borderlands will be published by Open Books in November. You can pre-order here. Here’s what readers who had a sneak preview are saying about it:
“The perfect pandemic travel book. This is Mould’s third in his “Postcards” series, and perhaps his best.” -Paul Epstein, retired public school teacher, writer, musician
“A fascinating collection of tales about trials and triumphs at the border, gracefully interwoven with history and geography, and guaranteed to ignite a bit of wanderlust in anyone who shares Mould’s sense of wonder and adventure at our strangely eclectic world of borders.” -Natalie Koch, Associate Professor of Geography, Syracuse University, New York
Preview of “The Borders of Johannesburg”
For half a century, the borders of South Africa were defined by the racial segregation of the apartheid system. The chapter opens at Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum with its symbolic “separate entrances” for whites and non-whites, then moves to Soweto—the townships where the first major anti-apartheid protests in 1976 were violently suppressed. Since the end of apartheid, Soweto has been transformed into a lower middle class suburb, its shacks and shanties replaced by small houses and apartment blocks. With shopping malls and soccer stadiums built for the 2010 World Cup, Soweto is on the tourist trail. Johannesburg has always been an economic magnet for migrants from other African countries. From Soweto, I travel to the crowded downtown migrant district of Hillbrow, then north to the vast informal settlement of Diepsloot (Afrikaans for “deep ditch”), where migrants from other African countries have been the target for violent attacks. I join the mostly black crowd at a professional soccer match, then square dance with Afrikaners at a church social in the suburbs, as I try to understand the internal borders that still exist in this diverse, but troubled country.
