The gentrification of Soweto hides its cruel apartheid history | Niq Mhlongo

A quarter of Johannesburg's population live in this modern and sophisticated township that is also blighted by poverty, drug addiction and crime

My mother tells me the house where I was born in the Chiawelo section of Soweto in 1973 didn't have windows, doors or a paved floor when they moved in. My father earned very little as a cleaner at the post office and had no money to fix it.

So my mother and her friends would go to a nearby farm to steal cow dung to make the floor. One day she got bitten by the farmer's dog. That scar of poverty is still engraved on her hand like an ugly tattoo.