The Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg

Well I’ve been in South Africa for just over a week now and so far I am loving it. I went and visited the Apartheid Museum on Wednesday 25^th August. Like most people, I’ve heard all about the great statesman Nelson Mandela and the role he played in ending apartheid, but I’d never really learnt about apartheid and what it actually meant to the people living through it in any detail.

As you enter the museum, you are randomly classed as either ‘White’ or ‘Black’ and had to enter through either the ‘Whites Only’ gate or the ‘Blacks Only’ gate.

The system of apartheid was then explained; each person was categorised as either ‘White’, ‘Coloured’, which meant a person was of mixed Black and White descent, or ‘Black’. It was quite a flexible system, and was not so much about the colour of your skin as your social grouping. Consequently, it was explained, sometimes people were re-categorised. In practice, this meant that your rights could sometimes be taken away overnight.

During apartheid, which started in the late 1940s, black people were essentially afforded less privileges. They were moved into ‘townships’ where they had severely reduced civil liberties and infinitely less opportunities than their white counterparts. The museum gave an immense amount of detail about apartheid, its origins and how it worked in practice. One of the mechanisms by which apartheid was enforced was by passing a number of laws, such as prohibiting mixed marriages.

The museum also interwove the factual history with the stories of real people, and painted a graphic and disturbing picture of the realities and hardships of daily life. When you realise that black domestic servants often had to have different cutlery and plates to their white bosses as they didn’t want to use crockery that had been ‘contaminated’, you appreciate the depth of segregation and how ingrained it was in peoples’ mentalities.

One of the things I found fascinating was learning about how apartheid actually came to end. It was not the overnight process I had imagined, rather it took several months of negotiating between the government and the ANC, of which Nelson Mandela was the leader. It also took hundreds of riots and demonstrations across South Africa, during which hundreds of people were killed. Seeing the video footage of white police beating young students protesting peacefully against the regime was particularly shocking.

A number of changes took place in South Africa after this. A new constitution was drawn up affording equality and freedom for all different groups. Whilst this is great in theory, obviously such profound social changes take a long time, and it is clear that today’s South Africa is still living in the shadow of apartheid.

Having said that, my feeling so far is that there is a deep sense of optimism in South Africa - the love for Nelson Mandela verges on the obsessive, and his words are venerated: