Since the first moment you cross the first door you start to “feel” … The Museum of Apartheid, in Johannesburg, is impressively explicit and its museography, exhibitions and setting are SO well accomplished that when they give you the entrance ticket you get in tune with the seriousness of the topics to be discussed.
What impacts most of the entry receipt is not that it has a number, nor that it says the name of the museum, it’s that it evokes the segregation mechanisms used in the past, by randomly cataloging the visitors between “white” and “not white”, thus leading them to have an experience of access to facilities based on a similar discrimination that was experienced in the time and context that is intended to expose.
The Apartheid Museum is a space that guides tourism, both local and foreign, towards memory and historical justice. It is a powerful example of how a very complex topic can be taken and oriented towards the analysis, study and reformulation of the narrative around a convulsive past and the creation of conscience and a spirit of reconciliation.
This is one of ‘those’ museums that you can’t go with revolted hormones, nor with sensitivity to the surface. It’s one of those that manages to masterfully teach you a dark fragment of the recent past. One that not only must be visited, but return whenever possible. Here some of the things you can find in there:
Segregation
As said before, you will experience the segregation in the entrance, you will see how the major South African cities were during the Apartheid era, all filled with signs so it was clear, who belonged on each area. How those who lived there originally were displaced, abused, killed, raped, mocked, incarcerated…
Outdoor exhibition:
The first part of your experience takes advantage of the path of the main building to present the factors that make us appropriate this story and, at the same time, present the bases or background that gave rise to racism in South Africa and its roots within this society. The journey strictly establishes the point that we are all equal, from our origin.
The Timeline
Once fully in the building and after that introduction, you go into walls that appear to be metal mesh with exhibition panels that draw a clear timeline from the Great Treak of the Voortrekkers to the escalation of violence.
The Main Exhibition
You will find many items, from personal belongings to original street signs and even a war truck, as well as many things that was originally used to oppress the population for years.
In the midst of shock, because for me it wasn’t the same to hear it as to see the images that so crudely documented it, I realized that this is how the story of my own country, MY history, started. And I was conscious of how I appropriated the pain, I appropriated the humiliation, I appropriated the shame to feel that I’m also the result of these systematizations, that I’m the result of those violations, and that my blood – and probably also yours – serves as evidence of those ravages. This was no longer the past of a country that I visited for the first time, what I was presented in this museum was a fragment of the history that belonged to me …
What was the Apartheid?
Apartheid was a system of segregation that existed in South Africa from 1948 until the 1990s (practically the other day!) In which EVERYTHING, from state policies to urban organization and codes of human relations, was based on in the racial classification according to the appearance, social acceptance or ancestry of the individual with a simple objective: That the white minority conserve their privileges, comforts, wealth and welfare state.
Walls like the old fortress on Constitution Hill in Johannesburg (place from which I already published a post, so go and check it out) turned their weapons inward and fixed their attention on those beings who had dared to interfere with the status quo dictated by Apartheid. Multiple spaces were restructured and turned into intimidating infrastructures of confinement in it was a mix of those who deserved to be there for their criminal acts, others that had done nothing more than the logical thing: To demand that human rights be respected and that racism be ended that at that time, ruled South Africa.
The measures taken included actions that were not “relative” or “subjective” and already by the 1970s the ravages of Apartheid were considered by the United Nations to be “crimes against humanity”.
The heroes
From the horrors of Apartheid emerged multiple relevant figures, subjects with enough vision and conviction to sacrifice their physical integrity, their freedom and even their lives in order to modify the “status quo”. There is a whole part of the Apartheid Museum dedicated to meet them: popular leaders, academics, workers, students … And among these were not only those who were discriminated against: at different times there were also voices of ‘Afrikaners’, those South African whites with European ancestry, who left their comfort zone to question the atrocities committed by the regime.
Out of all the scrap of the dark past that represents the era of Apartheid in South Africa, a nation re-emerged full of wounds, traumas, scars and divisions many of which, sadly, are still present (to a greater or lesser extent). I, just now in 2019, was an auditory witness of some them and if I am honest at some point I even cried with frustration (I told you that this topic touched me deeply).
Tell me: how much did YOU know about all this? How do you feel about this topic?
Here you have an album with many photos, so you can understand the experience provided in this museum much better:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/4Ps83gU8mkA2ieJg6
And if you want to read more about this place, you can check te article that served me as a source, written by myself:
“Apartheid Museum: tourism, memory & historical justice”.
and just before getting your message.
self got it all wrong?..