Mariano Castrillón, Roodepoort: While I was browsing at a bookstore, two postcards caught my eye.

One was an aerial view of Soweto. On the back it says: "From the air the neatness and orderliness of the thousands of homes on their small plots is most striking." The other is an aerial view of "an informal settlement in South Africa". "Informal settlement" is clearly a euphemism for "place of no hope".

The overseas visitor with me commented that Soweto was how Africans were forced to live in the apartheid era; the other postcard showed how they chose to live after apartheid. My visitor was wrong. Places of no hope are the result of our government's lack of integrity, responsibility and accountability. Nobody chooses to live in a sewer.