Concrete begins to give way to countryside, but the ravages of apartheid are becoming quickly apparent again. You realize that there are shanties all around the sides of the road, and that you're the only white person amongst them. We pass by the teachers university; Mishack has a daughter studying there. It looks like a minimum security prison. Low one story brick building spread amongst a compound surrounded by a high wall of the same brick topped with barbed wire.

Further down the road is the largest hospital in the world. I've read that to visit is physically sickening to most westerners, that it forever changes ones perception of the third world. We don't stop; Mishack merely points it out.

There is a news crew shooting a ways down, and Mishack pulls over to say hello to some former coworkers. Anne-Marie and I get out to stretch our legs. There is a pedestrian overpass here, and Mishack guides us up onto it. Below us is a parking lot, a sea of Volkswagen and Toyota microbuses. This is the main form of transportation for the working black. Their lives are dependent on them, as are the economy of black labor in Johannesburg. The jobs are not in Soweto.

Think of the busses as a large scale, lazzies-fair carpooling enterprise. The busses drive around Soweto in the morning, the driver holding his hand out the window with a raised index finger. It doesn't mean that his bus is number one; it means he's looking for riders going into the city. Black entrepreneurs started these operations to make money (as all entrepreneurs do) and to fill a vital social need in the Soweto community, providing cheap fast transportation to peoples jobs in the city center.

The white apartheid establishment quickly moved to shut them down. The busses and their small time operators were seen as a threat to the whites stranglehold control over black live in the townships. The government quickly acquiesced when they realized
the blacks had no other way to get to their jobs.

Our legs stretched now, we get back into Mishack's "limo" to drop by
his house. We wind through the middle-class neighborhood of Soweto. Just like any city anywhere, Soweto has exclusive neighborhoods, middle-class tracts, and housing for the poor. Most cities don't include fetid shantytowns.

Mishack's house is just like all the rest on the street. One story, small, close together, built by the government. He brings us inside, amongst fashionable furniture, pictures of the family, pictures of him with Dan Rather. He tells us about his plans to add a second story to the home. He has already bought the house behind him and put in a little concrete courtyard between the two. Like most homes in South Africa, Mishack's is surrounded by a high fence.

We meet a few of Mishack's relatives, pose for a few pictures, and the get back in the "limo" to go to the next stop on the tour.

We go now to a church. It seems fitting. Earlier we had visited the cemetery. There were many small stones as far as the eye could see. Afrikaner mythology held that the bodies buried here concealed automatic weapons, ammunition, rockets, grenades, everything that goes bang was rumored to be in nearly every casket. The white's fear of a black rebellion touches even the dead. Armageddon, to many Afrikaners, features thousands of bodies coming up out of the earth, giving up these hidden weapons to the vengeful masses. Somehow I think the blacks have the good sense to have used the weapons instead of burying them. Lead does a lot more damage than rocks.

We arrive at Regina Mundi, the seat of the black church in Soweto and the pulpit Tutu preached upon. The twelve stations are depicted in stained glass. There is a small sanctuary. The grounds are well kept, bounded by a high fence on barbed wire in the best South African tradition.

We stood in silence here in this humble African church. This is where the shouts of revolution reverberated, crashing against the walls my footsteps find echoes in. This was the gathering place, not only of worship but in the truest Christian sense of a church - a body of people.

Mishack points out to me where the soldiers came in. Coming up from that road there, stopping and stationing themselves outside of this door and the one over there. The windows shattered by canisters of tear gas, forcing the people out to mercy of the soldiers. But soldiers in South Africa then never had much mercy. In fact, they never had. More questions would be asked of a poacher than a soldier shooting helpless Christians fleeing the gassed out sanctuary.

The atrocity of the act haunted me as I walked through the nave. I sat down on a pew to ponder this history of this place, the tension of that moment. Imagining the great hall packed with the oppressed singing hymns and songs of freedom. Imagining the shattering of windows, the chokes and gasps under the gas, the stampede to escape it.

And I realized the cruel irony of the situation. This land, stolen by the Afrikaners who trekked out of the Cape to create a homeland free of the British. A tribe of white people with the bible at the very core. A nation led by men like Kruger, who never read a book in his life other than the bible. That here is the Transvaal, God's promised land to the dutch religious exiles, could be the home to such an ungodly act. I can grasp the depths of human atrocity. I can comprehend the mindset of a government and its need to attack with no remorse the revolution. I don't think it is right, but I can understand that that is how life often is in this world.

Here I sat fumbling for an explanation. How could these people, so dedicated to Christ to leave two homelands, could attack such a place. How could they defile the most holy place. I can't find an answer, but I can understand how desperately scared South Africa was. Fear and hatred. Hymns and tear gas. The song of freedom. The price of revolution? The sin of colonization?

Anne-Marie and I make a small donation, and walk out it silence. We had walked through the percolator of the revolution. We were now going to where the flint struck the steel. Mishack had covered the story.

The students, perhaps 10,000 of them, had gathered here to protest the compulsory use of Afrikaans in the schools. We might have called it a march, a demonstration, perhaps maybe mob. Afrikaners called it an "impi," a group of tribal warriors on the war path. In some ways, that may be right. But the peaceful protesters had no weapons, no shields, not that would have changed the outcome.

From down this street, the one sloping down the hill, the hippos approached. Snarling their diesel fumes, black animals of oppression. Inside the hippos belly, a full meal of soldiers ready to be thrown up onto the street. The massive white impi approached the square. The crowd gathered took notice, the started to scatter at their approach. Here, on this place I stood, in June 1976, a thirteen year old boy was shot in cold blood by a white man in cold uniform. I was three months old. The revolution was born. Others died here, but Hector Petersen was the first.

It is his name on the memorial in this small park. It is only a few years old. It is a small courtyard, the ground chunky rocks. The small granite memorial sits in the center. A large mural on the street side commemorates the children who died in the black struggle for freedom. Surrounding the memorial on the other sides are whitewashed 20 foot ocean containers. The containers house the collection of photos documenting the fight for liberation. Photos by Peter Magubane and Sam Nzima, most in black and white, haunt the eyes with pain, blood, battle, death. The first pass though puts one in shellshock. I stop for a cigarette, and talk with Mishack about those days. He remembers them to me, the violence, the pain, but also the joy of unity, fighting the good battle, not the political infighting of today, the legacy of any democracy old or new. I go back in to one of the containers to consider the horrors of my birth year again.

The soldiers grab me. I am helpless to resist. They are the power, the ones with the guns and the batons and the hippos. I think I am beginning to understand what is happening. The are rushing me away, the soldiers, to a place they seem to know well They are taking me away, far away, to a place they themselves cannot escape, a place that holds them much stronger than their iron grip on me. Here it is now, this is what it is, this thing holding onto them, refusing to let go, even today.

I am looking into their eyes. Studying their faces. These black clad troopers with machine guns and batons and bayonets and bombs. I hear the screaming crowd, the choppers overhead, and looking at their eyes. And it is full of fear. I don't see the hatred holding them so strong, but I see the fear that is the result. It is like back in the church, being captivated not by the human atrocity but the sick irony of the white mans action. Here now I am possessed not by the blood and tears, but the fear in the faces of the oppressor. I think I understand Apartheid a lot better now.

We leave the memorial in silence. Anne-Marie bought some postcards. I am still stunned by the fear. I think I am understanding not only this struggle now, but the nature of the world. Violence is not about power. It is about fear. Massacres are not about power, about getting your way. They are about fear.

We drive away through the streets of Soweto. It's mid afternoon, and we are ready for lunch. We head off to another Soweto institution - Wandie's Place. Black under apartheid were not allowed to have bars or taverns. So people started having folks over to their homes and sold them food and beer. The Shebeen was born. Wandie's is the most famous. We have a few drinks, and enjoy the wonderful buffet. I stuff myself, gorging on the goodness of the place after such a drought of fear, oppression, poverty, history.

After lunch we drive around a while longer. Mishack show us where Mandela lived, where Tutu's house is, Winnie's compound. And we are suddenly back amongst green fields heading back to the city. Like star trekkers beaming back up to the familiar security of our own world, having boldly gone where we hadn't been before.