Apartheid

Along with the Big Five, World Cup Rugby, and and the Cape of Good Hope, one of the first things that come to people's minds when you mention South Africa is apartheid. So I decided to be a tourist (one of the helpful recommendations from The Happy Migrant blog in order to help you get your bearings) and visit the Apartheid Museum in downtown Johannesburg to find out more about it.

I didn't know much about apartheid before I went to the museum except that it was bad, and President Nelson Mandela was instrumental in its demise. My only tangible reference for Nelson Mandela, besides once waving to his motorcade as he made his way down a Manhattan street on his way to address the United Nations, was located in the education and exhibition gardens at the Greater Newark Conservancy headquarters. GNC, a non-profit in downtown Newark NJ, encourages urban community gardening and city greening and its exhibition garden showcases good gardening practices amongst many different themed-gardens including a colonial garden, a butterfly garden, a therapy garden and Native American garden. There is also a Nelson Mandela Freedom garden (Nelson Mandela was a fellow gardener) which has as its centerpiece a little patio with cement columns and an open roof having the same dimensions as the tiny cell Nelson Mandela inhabited for more than 20 years. Even with the open walls and ceiling it is an imposingly oppressive space.

As a rule I do not really do well with touring prisons and museums dedicated to bad things like concentration camps, the holocaust, or uprisings and revolutions. I had nightmares for days after visiting Alcatraz Island in high school. And as there was no way I could visit Dachau while in Germany, I will have to work up the courage to visit Robbens Island off the coast of Cape Town where the original political prison and the actual cell of Nelson Mandela is found. A must-do! I hoped the Apartheid Museum would be educational and uplifting like Mandela himself.

Upon arriving, you are given the choice of entering the museum through a door marked White or Non-White. But just as you are not given the option of your skin color when you are born, you are not given the option of which door you can go through at the museum. When you buy your ticket it tells you who you are, a White or a Non-White. I got a little nervous when I drew Non-White; Vince drew White. He traded with me but I needn't have worried. The extent of the experience consisted of walking down the same photograph-lined walkway separated by a wall of prison bars. Once we entered the main lobby, we were reunited.


There is a 15 minute movie that plays at the beginning of the museum which gives you the history of South Africa from its early cave inhabitants to its tribal era to the Dutch occupation, British rule, Boer-British conflicts, the discovery of gold and diamonds and finally the dawn of the National Party reign and apartheid. You are then released to wander at your own pace through the museum exhibits depicting South Africa's subsequent history through television and news footage, photographs and artifacts.


The Museum itself is extremely well done and not as graphic as it could have been. The most disturbing exhibit besides some of the live footage of the rioters and police response was a room with 121 nooses hanging, each one representing one of the political victims executed by the government. It certainly did not represent everyone who died during the apartheid era which made the display that much more chilling.

Even though Nelson Mandela is of course well-represented in the permanent exhibition, there was an additional temporary equally impressive exhibit dedicated to his life story which we also toured. It was the uplifting story I was hoping for when learning about apartheid.

Johannesburg has many more sights which played a more integral role in South Africa's struggle against apartheid. The Lilieshief Farm and the Rivonia Trial Museum, Nelson Mandela's and Archbishop Tutu's House in Soweto (on the same street, it is the only street in the world which was home to two Nobel Peace Laureates) and the Hector Pieterson Museum and Memorial to name a few. We will surely tour them all over time but the Apartheid Museum was a great place to begin to understand the big picture and apartheid's place in the turbulent history of South Africa.

And as a final note, I did leave the Apartheid Museum with an unexpected smile on my face. It was the result of a tradition I reinstated from the days when we would travel with our sons when they were young, the silly souvenir contest. We would scour the national park gift shops or even better, road-side souvenir and rest stops, looking for the silliest souvenirs we could bring back from our trip. Then we would find a reasonably impartial judge to decide which one of us won. There was a 3 point scale. The souvenir had to represent the trip the best, had to be relatively useful, and had to be cheap. (This got me started on my extensive floaty pen collection by the way - 200 and still collecting!) Somehow either Nick or Alex always won (we had very soft judges and they were very persuasive). Although I contend to this day that I was robbed with my buffalo "pie"-shaped Frisbee from Yellowstone.

The Apartheid Museum gift shop provided me with an uncontested silly souvenir for our home, coffee mugs for Whites and Non-Whites. When you see that kind of silly souvenir in the gift shop it gives you hope that wounds will someday completely heal and everything will be okay.