Originally there were only temporary living quarters for the mine workers, before Soweto was declared a ghetto for the black population of Johannesburg by the infamous “Urban Areas Act” in 1923. Although the government had a housing program to build hundreds of thousands of plain two-room houses here, the illegal squatter camps kept on growing and spreading.

Still Soweto is by no means only an accumulation of tin shacks. There are also better suburbs and a number of well functioning social institutions like schools and hospitals. The main impression though is that crowding and poverty, and Tour Guides often refer to it as the ‘Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. The home that Nelson Mandela and Winnie Mandela shared, Freedom Square, Regina Mundi church, the Hector Pieterson Memorial & museum, Vilakazi Street (central to the 1976 ‘Youth uprising’) and informal settlements are on offer in Soweto and this tour covers a comprehensive selection of these