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Gauteng - Mamelodi |  |
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Gauteng Province, north-east of Pretoria One of the bigger of the expansive residential areas, once known as 'black townships', that ring the Johannesburg-Pretoria complex, Mamelodi is 16 kilometres from north-east of Pretoria's Church Square (city centre), and was established in 1951 to house the fast-growing labour force that served South Africa's industrial heartland. Originally called Vlakfontein, its name was later changed to Mamelodi, which translates approximately as 'the man who can imitate birds' or 'the father of whistling' - which is how Transvaal republican president Paul Kruger was known to the African people (just why remains something of a mystery).
Mamelodi isn't really geared for visitors; it boasts few features special enough to draw in the outside world, though of course the residents themselves enjoy the standard attractions and distractions provided by all bustling high-density urban centres. Worth visiting, however - in company of a guide - is the Islamic Centre, which, perhaps surprisingly in view of the name, honours the thousands of largely unheralded non-white soldiers who served the country during two world wars. More than 80,000 Black volunteers and many Coloured and Indian South Africans enlisted during the 1914 - 1918 conflict; 25,000 were sent to the Western Front; in one disaster 700 died when their troopship, the Mendi, sank after striking a German mine (in an eerie turn of events, news of tragedy reached the victims' families in Southern Africa before the official announcement). The figures were even more impressive in the second war (1939 - 1945). One soldier, Lance-Corporal Job Mosego, personified the contribution of blacks to the Allied cause: serving in North Africa, Mosego was awarded the Military Medal for his single-handed, audacious destruction of an enemy freighter in Tobruk harbour. Under guard as a prisoner-of-war, he managed nevertheless to slip aboard the ship, placed a tin filled with gunpowder (collected from live ammunition scattered in the prison yard) in the petrol drums aboard, and blew the vessel up. He displayed, said the citation, 'ingenuity, determination and complete disregard for personal safety, punishment by the enemy, or the ensuing explosion …'.
Pretoria lies to the south-west. |
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MAMELODI Western Cape
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