Soweto is taking back her children

Goodbye Sandton, Hello Soweto! You must be asking yourselves what it is I could have up my sleeve with such a title. Well, it is no secret.

Consider the distance from Sandton to Soweto. It is nothing compared to the distance between Johannesburg and Berlin. But your understanding of this distance might change when you consider that the journey between Sandton and Soweto partly began in Berlin on September 15 1884.

On that day, we are told, 14 states of some of the great powers of the time, including the US, met in the grand ballroom of the palace of chancellor Otto von Bismarck. A 5m-high map of Africa dominated the room.

Part of the spirit of that conference is captured in two clauses of its preamble:

"Wishing, in a spirit of good and mutual accord, to regulate the conditions most favourable to the development of trade and civilisation in certain regions of Africa; and

"Being desirous, on the other hand, to obviate the misunderstanding and disputes which might in future arise from new acts of occupation on the coast of Africa ... "

This was the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. The journey from Sandton to Soweto had begun.

A little before this conference, the wars of conquest in Southern Africa had just about ended decisively with the defeat of the Zulus in April of 1879. Diamond mining was under way in Kimberley and gold mining in Johannesburg was about to begin in earnest. Cecil John Rhodes was on his way to leaving his stamp on the nature of capitalism in Southern Africa and on the shape of the landscape on which it would flourish.

The administration of conquest in Southern Africa was well under way and the Berlin conference would give it a permissive global character.

While you ponder these weighty facts of history, I would like to shift your gaze to a slice of life far less dramatic. It comes in the form of a nine-bedroom residence in the village of Violet Bank in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga. It reportedly cost its owner R19-million. The house looks so huge and unwieldy in its surroundings that the Sunday Times, which published its picture in July, observed that it could "easily be mistaken for a hotel".

It may not be as grand as chancellor Bismarck's palace, but it attracts attention with its "nine en suite bedrooms, each with its own fireplace and chimney. The main bedroom has an office. There are three lounges, two bars, a theatre and an entertainment area. There is also a refrigeration room."

Here is the human imagination at its freest, conjuring into reality the dream house of 40-year-old Mr Tshepo Magabane, who plans to use it for holidays and ultimately for his retirement. Meanwhile, he lives in another mansion in Pretoria.

A board in front of the house bears the words "Dithamaga Baropodi". They ring like a self-displaying proclamation. Next to this verbal self-identifier is its visual message. It is, said the Sunday Times, a "drawing of a tiger, which, according to Pedi culture, is a symbol of strength, wisdom and luck".

This house seems to project the pride of its owner. It conveys a message of his success. It seems Mr Magabane has a lot of money - and a lot of it remains after he has built his mansions.

Interestingly, the article attracted two letters to the editor. One came from a Mr Mawale, who, although writing from Johannesburg, originates in the village of Shatale, also in Mpumalanga.

This reader is proud of Mr Magabane's achievement. He thinks that people like him who overcame hardships to acquire an education should not have to "build a matchbox when he can afford a mansion of his dreams ... We from Bushbuckridge are proud of people like Magabane. They inspire us."

The second letter comes from Mrs Thobeka Shangase of Durban. "For three years," she writes intriguingly, "I lived in a three-bedroom house in the suburbs. I felt, at the time, the suburbs were the next step for me. When it came to making our dream house a reality, my husband and I explored many options.

"We soon realised that a dream house in the suburbs came with a huge price tag. We decided to buy land in the township where we grew up and build our dream house here. We were able to build a seven-bedroom house there for a fraction of the price and living there is far more economical than living in the suburbs would be.

"For the past five years, there has been a huge influx of black people leaving affluent suburbs such as Westville, Ballito and Umhlanga and building big houses in the townships.

"This is not a case of flaunting one's wealth. For many, building in the townships is a smart financial decision ...

"It's a good thing that there is a return of people to the townships - people who are there to build and not destroy. The township is also a place where dreams are shaped and can be realised. People can be successful and they don't have to run to the suburbs.

"By living in the townships, we are able to send our children to a private school. We wouldn't be able to do that if [we] were living in the suburbs. If we want to slaughter a goat or a cow, we don't have to first get written permission from anyone, or face fines. In the township we are able to live and live well."

In Mr Magabane is the story of generations of people who travelled from far and wide to work in the mines and factories of the consolidated country that came to be called South Africa.

At first, they moved out of compulsion. In time, compulsion transformed into opportunity. If the dreaming of the dispossessed was forcefully restricted for much of the 20th century, it intensified in the new democracy after 1994. Mr Magabane's mansion is a factor of galloping dreams. Opportunity and money suddenly abounded.

Mrs Shangase's choice, on the other hand, is more considered and calculated. It is creative, resourceful and practical. She is a symbol of a strategic and practical imagination.

Much of the country that was imagined in the course of a liberation struggle of close to a century has been embodied in the South African constitution. The question we must now ask is how much of that imagined country has been created, taking into account the imaginative and practical resourcefulness of Mrs Shangase's choices?

It is as if the new democracy is catching up, rather than creating and adjusting creatively. The ability of the 20-year-old democracy to deliver on its promises has become perilously uncertain.

When the Shangases moved from their Durban suburb back to their township, they were part of a growing trend. Soweto, the ultimate symbol of the South African township, is taking back her children. Sandton, with all its glitter, turned out not to be home. Moving there may have been part of affirming the constitutional rights of movement and claiming back the land. But the suburbs were no home.

It makes sense. South African suburbs are a product of a long history of political racism. For the dispossessed let into them, they represent existential discomfort and deep political anxieties. If you were once there out of compulsion, you may be there now to make a statement. That statement, you learn, could never be the sum total of your reason to be.

What came to be Soweto grew into a multi-ethnic melting pot, a congregation of millions of the dispossessed throughout the subcontinent of Southern Africa.

They became the first full-blown working class of Africa. They became the first people in Africa to undergo a vast industrial, multi-ethnic, multicultural, multi-intellectual adaptation. This is the miracle that came along the way of the dispossessed. They found one another there and built social solidarities they had never experienced before.

Section 1(b) of the founding provisions of the constitution of South Africa refers to the values of "non-racialism and non-sexism". The extensive consultative process to put the constitution together missed two critical values built over a century of living them in the townships of South Africa: non-ethnicism and multiculturalism.

The dominance of race relations in the public imagination has blocked out the treasure of South African history: a cosmopolitanism that flourished in various ways in the townships.

The real strategic alternative to "whiteness" is not "blackness", but multi-ethnic identities in a common constitutional citizenship in which multi-ethnic bonding took place to various degrees in the townships of South Africa. Even if tragedies and triumphs occurred, it was bonding nevertheless.

White South Africans chose formally to stay out of that historic process. Mostly they were blissfully unaware of it; where they did notice it, they sought to tear it apart.

They are now free to become part of a greater human solidarity: the township's greatest gift to South Africa, and perhaps to the world.

The families of Mrs Shangase and Mr Magabane, who have returned to the opportunities they have discovered in their respective formative origins, enjoin us to take the journey with them, part real, part conceptual, from Sandton to Soweto. They urge us to go along with them into the future.

Then perhaps, armed with success, we will pass by in Berlin on that journey, where Berliners will have surely agonised over the implications of Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-first Century for global peace and welfare. And we will say to them: we have found new ways to truly humanise capitalism and perhaps avoid the next global wars.

We have reconceptualised and restructured South Africa's economy to make life livable for all its citizens. New political parties have emerged to give political energy to emergent visions informed by a new awareness.

So perhaps with this festival celebrating 20 years of democracy in South Africa, Berliners and Sowetans will begin a new journey of sharing the world. Soweto, in this context, may very well be a new Mother City. On that day in Berlin, we may even meet in the chancellor's palace with huge, 5m-high maps of Germany and South Africa on the walls to share the stories of how we have remade ourselves.

This is an edited extract from the keynote address delivered by Ndebele this week at the House of Cultures of the World in Berlin to commemorate South Africa's 20 years of democracy. Ndebele is a research fellow at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town, a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study and chancellor of the University of Johannesburg