On a Tuesday morning in late March, the queue outside the Nelson Mandela house museum stretches thirty metres past the gate and doubles back along a wall daubed with a mural of the Struggle. Most of the people waiting are not South African. They hold cameras and guidebooks and wear the slightly anxious expression of tourists who have come a long way to be awed. Across the street, a new coffee shop called Ezaleni serves flat whites for R75 and oat milk cortados for R85. The barista, a twenty-three-year-old from Dobsonville named Thabo, tells me he cycles forty minutes to work each morning because he cannot afford to live in the suburb he grew up in.
Between 2016 and 2026, median house prices on and around Vilakazi Street rose from R680,000 to just over R2.1 million, according to data compiled from Lightstone and Deeds Office records by the University of the Witwatersrand's urban studies unit. In the broader Soweto South-West corridor, the picture is more varied, but the trend lines point in one direction. In Dube, Pimville, and Dobsonville — the postcodes that abut the tourism spine — freehold properties have appreciated at roughly twice the national average since 2019. Estate agents report that a growing share of buyers are from outside the township: Sandton professionals, Cape Town investors, and a number of foreign nationals drawn by favourable exchange rates and the cultural cachet of an address the world has heard of.
Nomvula Sithole has lived in the same four-room house on Mooki Street since 1971. Her late husband, a schoolteacher named Ezekiel, received a permit to occupy the property in the months before the Soweto Uprising. She has no intention of selling. But three of her children — two daughters and a son, all of them professionals in their thirties — have already been priced out of the neighbourhood. Her youngest daughter, Palesa, rents a flat in Eldorado Park; her son Katlego bought in Midrand. "They grew up here," Nomvula says, sitting in the kitchen with her hands wrapped around a mug of rooibos. "This is their home. But it is not possible for them to come back."
The city has never seen us as stakeholders. It has always seen us as scenery.
Tebogo Mokoena has been organising around housing rights in Soweto for fifteen years, first with the Landless People's Movement and now through an organisation she co-founded called Abase Ekhaya — roughly, those who belong here. She uses the word 'aestheticisation' carefully, deliberately, the way an academic might. "What is happening is not simply gentrification in the Chicago sense," she explains from her office in Meadowlands. "It is something more specific. The township is being made picturesque for external consumption. The suffering and the history and the genius of this place are being packaged and sold to people who did not endure any of it. And the people who did are being pushed to the edge of the map."
The Wits urban studies unit's data suggests that internal displacement — residents relocating to cheaper precincts within the broader township — has accelerated since 2022. Between 2022 and 2025, out-migration from the Vilakazi precinct was up forty-three per cent compared to the preceding three-year period. Many of those who left are renters rather than owners: according to Statistics South Africa's 2024 community survey, roughly thirty-eight per cent of Soweto's housing stock is rented, a figure that has crept upward by nearly six points since 2016. Rents in the tourism corridor have risen in step with property values, and there is no legislative mechanism — no rent stabilisation ordinance, no community land trust framework — to slow the tide.
There is a particular kind of grief that attaches to a neighbourhood becoming famous. Soweto is admired globally for its music, its political history, its street life — and foreign visitors come in their thousands to walk Vilakazi Street, to eat at Wandie's Place, to pay their respects at sites that carry the weight of a history they want to understand. That admiration has translated into money, and money has translated into displacement, and displacement has translated into the slow evacuation of exactly the thing the tourists came to find. Tebogo Mokoena's organisation is lobbying the City of Joburg for a heritage precinct framework that would give long-term residents a form of preferential tenure. She is not optimistic. "The city," she says, "has never seen us as stakeholders. It has always seen us as scenery."
