We are cleaning Soweto to help us create the SA of our dreams

I DID not like the way it made me feel. My bag taken by a stranger and ruffled through.

The first time it happened it was so unexpected, it happened so fast and as I walked away from the store I felt dirty, violated, like a thief.

The second time it happened, I was prepared. I clutched onto my clutch bag and refused. I had spent the drive to Jabulani Mall rehearsing for my shop at Food Lover’s Market. I rehearsed my speech.

“I refuse to be searched. I have never done anything in my life to be searched. I’ve never been arrested.”

I had resolved that if they insisted on searching me, they could reverse the transaction and keep their goods. I wasn’t going to be searched. There was something about that experience I knew was teaching me the wrong lesson, I was internalising the wrong ideas about self. As I walked out the store, without my goods, the manager looked at me and said in Zulu: “But you know how we are, this is Soweto, we have to be searched.” I didn’t like the way it made me feel.

I had been counting the days since the sewage had burst at the corner of the street near my home. It was day 11, and still raw sewage rapids thundered down the road. I watched as people jumped over, accustomed, adapted, resigned to this reality, hop-scotching, guiding their children on their way to catch taxis over human waste and used toilet paper.

As the looting erupted, I didn’t like the way that made me feel either. My heart fractured in the morning as I watched a mother and daughter carry a load of clothes, I thought, “Oh no what are you teaching her”. What was harder though, about this feeling, was the internal turmoil. You see, I didn’t care much for the mall. As far as I was concerned, they had instituted systems that communicated to every single customer they had, you are a criminal. Well, the criminals came to loot. I also had little concern because I had seen so many businesses buried at the birth of the mall, nothing good could come from something that creates so much devastation.

I did care about what I was seeing. People, poor and middle class, ready to behave in a manner I had never seen before. I watched people shrug off the shame. This violent assault on private capital felt like a retaliation.

When government fails to deliver services, when private capital exclaims, “You’re thieves, but we’ll take your money” when the lived experience teaches people to meander through garbage and jump over human waste, it says, you are not worth respect.

Teach those lessons for long enough, and only two outcomes are possible, a neo slavery or a country of nothing at all. We keep teaching these lessons and one day everyone will loot what’s left or private capital will reimagine new shackles to contain us with.

We started Soweto Saturdays because experience is the only teacher. If we want a future of innovative thinkers who lead industry, we need people to imagine beyond electricity cuts, burst sewer pipes and mall security.

Young people are protesting for the same things 25 years on, that were being fought for during apartheid, no change in discourse. We are still addressing elementary access to education, as in people walking through the doors of higher learning when in fact we should be fighting for the ability to be able to access learning in such a way that it enables imagination, inspires innovation.

We are cleaning Soweto because when you walk down clean streets, you’ll expect transport that runs on time. If transport is on time, you can imagine things to do with that time, like read, be creative, innovate, birth the ideas we need for the South Africa of our dreams to manifest.

Soweto Saturdays take place in Soweto every Saturday from 6am to 10am. The public and residents of Soweto are being called to contribute an hour or two to cleaning Soweto.