Vegas Meets Rome

The wake-up call is a visit to Soweto, the famous South West township, where on a single street you find the homes of two Nobel Prize winners, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Soweto resonates with realpolitik: the memorial to Hector Pieterson, the young Black schoolboy who died in the 1976 language riots, is so poignant it brings tears to your eyes. Through carefully assimilated videos, eyewitness accounts and newspaper reports a horrific reminder is built up of the schoolchildren who disappeared while protesting the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction. The rebellion had rapidly ignited the whole Black student population of the country.