Several readers of this column have over time asked me just where South Africa’s anti-Apartment Black movement started and where the first plans for guerilla and terrorist warfare were laid on the political road to eventual Independence.

The exact spot was just south of the country’s giant mining city of Johannesburg on a stretch of land to later become known as the South Western township, or S.O.W.E.T.O. for short.

Interestingly, however, this housing project of over 24,000 homes was first made possible by South Africa’s richest man at the time, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, head of the well-known international Anglo American Mining Corporation and de Beers Diamond conglomerate.

It all started in the 1940/50s when would-be African mining labourers and factory workers started arriving in Johannesburg by the drove from all over South Africa and neighbouring territories but had nowhere to live.

As a result, Sir Ernest offered to loan the Johannesburg City Council R6 million and made a further secret R1 million donation as long as 10,000 fully serviced home sites were provided.

When I worked in Africa as a foreign correspondent and journalist after WWll, I flew in a chartered aircraft over Soweto shortly after the new township had been initially constructed in just five years.

I was completely astounded to see a model town of brick buildings built on a design very similar to Canberra and looking like a wheel with a central hub and roads resembling spokes emanating from the centre.

My inspection flight was followed by an on- ground investigation of houses I would have happily lived in, particularly as they were then being rented for only five shillings (50c) a month. From memory, the central hub area included a library, public swimming pool and all the communal buildings and facilities one would expect to find in a new suburb.

Some time later, I had the opportunity to interview the African National Congress president, Nelson Mandela, over dinner in his home overlooking one of SOWETO’s spoke-like streets. His young son and wife, Winnie, were present at the time and, after dinner, we visited a ‘shebeen’ or illegal drinking and ‘honky tonk’ piano nightspot.

I left Soweto that night in the 1950s, thinking just how pleasant a place it was in spite of a little unruliness in the shebeen and in some streets.

Not too long later to my great surprise, I had to urgently revisit Soweto late on the day African Independence activists had called a major national strike by all Black workers throughout South Africa.

I travelled to the one-time model township, driving a car plastered with Media signs for identification and safety purposes while being accompanied by a photographer, Mr Jan Hoek. We had been tipped off that ANC and Pan-African independence activists had taken over control in Soweto and were planning to deal with those African people not interested in Black politics but more so in earning a day’s wage.

After a few skirmishes with armed and angry crowds and having our vehicle damaged, we decided that we should situate ourselves in our car on a road overlooking Dube railway station where any city or mine workers who had broken the strike order would arrive back home after their day of labour.

To avoid any claims of exaggeration or hubris, I leave this aspect of my personal story to a book titled “Umkhonto We Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle.”

The writer, a Pretoria University historian, Thula Simpson, describes me and Jan Hoek as having to continually face, on that occasion, hundreds of angry Africans burning their identity ‘passes’ while armed with pangas, iron fence posts and other deadly weapons intent on killing or damaging anyone in their path and any Black workers who dared to oppose the strike.

“Oscar Tamsen of the Daily Mail was driving in Soweto that afternoon (of the national strike),” the author records. “At sunset, large groups of Africans are patrolling the streets. Many are also carrying rocks and threatening passing (African) motorists. Tamsen drives to Dube Railway Station. En route, pedestrians pelt the car with objects. The railway station is crowded with shouting people. Some are threatening to kill anybody arriving back by train from Johannesburg.

“Within minutes, the nearby bridge over the railway line (where our car was parked) is completely blocked, barring the car’s route out of the township. Tamsen (who was at the wheel) had to drive at speed over a wide gulley, (breaking the car’s suspension) and into the veld to escape via a little used side road before heading out to Meadowlands Police Station.

When we arrived at this relatively small police post, we found ourselves once again under attack as local Soweto African residents had turned on the building in an attempt to destroy it and attack its occupants. Fortunately for all of us, Army personnel arrived in the nick of time and led us to safety well out of the killing fields of Soweto.

That evening, many African workers arriving home in Soweto were killed either as they left the train or in taxis turned upside down by activists and set alight with petrol.

Various public amenities in Soweto were also burned to the ground in a matter of hours and vast sections of the township appeared to be in revolt among some burned out homes.

This, however, was only the start of Soweto’s sad history. The ‘Freedom Charter’ calling for an armed take-over of Apartheid South Africa was planned there together with the formation of the Umkhonto we Sizwe guerilla and terrorist arm of the South African Communist Party and the ANC.

In 1957, I reported on the Black activist group, ‘The Russians’, having a killing spree in Soweto with 50 Zulu warriors being left for dead.

While one could never condone Apartheid, the sad demise of Oppenheimer’s original Soweto stands as an important emblem to man’s inhumanity to man.