☰Soweto

The South Western Townships, 20 km southwest of central Johannesburg, were the epicentre of black resistance to apartheid — the 1976 student uprising against Afrikaans-medium teaching began here and was put down with 176 dead. Today Soweto is a city of over a million, best visited with a guide (many are former residents). The obvious stops are Vilakazi Street (the only street in the world on which two Nobel Peace laureates have lived — Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu), the Hector Pieterson Memorial commemorating the 1976 uprising, and the Regina Mundi church, sanctuary to activists during the apartheid years.