Crime, power cuts, poverty: 30 years on, the townships question Nelson Mandela’s legacy
A Friday morning in Soweto. Summer rains have washed the streets clean. The tourists cycle down Vilakazi Street, past new restaurants and street stalls selling handicrafts. In a souvenir shop window, a cleaner dusts a statue of Soweto’s most famous one-time resident: Nelson Mandela.
The tourists entertain no doubts about Mandela’s grandeur and goodness, his status as fighter in the struggle against the brutal and racist apartheid regime that kept the inhabitants of Soweto and tens of millions of others in poverty and squalor, and the Nobel prize winner’s record as the first leader of a free South Africa.
“Mandela has always been a hero to me, and I have tried to teach my children about him. He shows us what a single person can do to change the world,” said Marie Loyet, from Orléans, France, as she browsed T-shirts displaying some of the great man’s best-known
