Soweto
— — the street that holds two Nobel houses.
Not only on a wall.
“A million-person city southwest of Johannesburg, built originally as a township for Black workers under the segregation laws of the 1930s and the apartheid state that followed. Vilakazi Street in Orlando West is the only street in the world to have housed two Nobel Peace laureates, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. A block away stands the Hector Pieterson Memorial, marking the schoolchildren shot here on 16 June 1976. from the studio
Soweto, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Soweto — short for South Western Townships — lies on the Highveld at roughly 1,700 metres above sea level, immediately southwest of Johannesburg in Gauteng province. It grew out of segregation policies dating to the 1904 outbreak of plague in the inner city and was formalised under apartheid-era forced removals from the 1950s. The estimated population today sits above 1.3 million across more than thirty neighbourhoods, from Orlando and Diepkloof to Klipspruit and Meadowlands. Soweto is now an official suburb of the City of Johannesburg metropolitan municipality.
The defining date is 16 June 1976. On that Wednesday, between 3,000 and 10,000 schoolchildren in Soweto marched against a state mandate that half their lessons be taught in Afrikaans. Police opened fire near Orlando West Secondary; the photograph of 13-year-old Hector Pieterson carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo became one of the defining images of the 20th century. The day is marked annually as Youth Day, a national public holiday in South Africa, and the Hector Pieterson Memorial on Khumalo Street stands within sight of where he fell.
Vilakazi Street in Orlando West is the working centre of Soweto visits. Mandela House at number 8115, where the Mandela family lived from 1946 to 1962, opened as a museum in 1997 and runs daily from 09:00 to 16:30. Desmond Tutu's former home stands a short walk south. The Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum sit two blocks east, on Khumalo Street, open daily except major holidays. Most visitors join a guided walk from a local operator; routes also pass the Orlando Cooling Towers, now painted and used for bungee.