Today we went to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg and a tour of Soweto Township. Alex and I stayed the night with the MSU students at their hotel in Johannesburg the night before so we would be ready to depart with the rest of the group early in the morning. Our group loaded up the two vans with several tour guides who grew up in Soweto. Our first stop was the museum.
When you first get to the apartheid museum, you are given a card with a fake identity on it, both in English and Afrikaans. You are either white (blankes), or non-white (nie-blankes). I happened to get a white card. Then you are ushered through one of those regulated rotating entrances. Some of the students were cracking jokes, calling each other “Whitey” and “Darky,” and I was trying to get someone to trade cards with me. The atmosphere was light, but I couldn’t help but be reminded that not so long ago in South Africa, this separation was very serious and very real. Real people were losing their lives every day in the fight for racial justice and freedom in apartheid South Africa.
We passed through an outside exhibit before we entered the actual museum. Before we entered the actual museum, we were shown pictures of bushman paintings and a short film to show how some of the people of South Africa lived before the Dutch came to colonize. After that we were free to wander around as we pleased. The way the museum was set up wasn’t like how most museums are set up. There were few artifacts, as the majority of the things in the museum were signs, pictures, and video. It allowed one to move at a slow pace, absorb information in his or her own time, and reflect.
There was one part that hit me quite hard emotionally. In one room there were three large screens that were showing footage of conflicts between people in the townships and between the police and people in the townships during the early 1990s. One showed the conflicts between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) supporters in Thokoza, a township right outside of Zonkizizwe. This is also where much of the recent xenophobic violence broke out in the last few months.
These film clips really struck me because I remember that the “wars” between the ANC and IFP were the reason why the children in Nomusa’s family had to hide in the woods or in a drainpipe for most of their earl lives. Nomusa had to leave school after Grade 6 to care for her younger brother and sister when they were on the run. Her family had to dress her little brother, Bongani, in dresses so that men supporting the ANC wouldn’t kidnap or kill him. She told me stories about how the police would incite rioting in the township between the two groups to create chaos. Sometimes the police would participate in the violence, backing the ANC, and sometimes they would back the IFP. This not only created hatred between one political party and another, but ethnic hatred as well since mainly Xhosa people supported the ANC while Zulus supported the IFP.
I still can’t believe that all of this violence was going on less than 20 years ago—happening in my lifetime. It doesn’t seem real. It’s easy for Americans to forget or to not care about the lasting effects of apartheid because we are not reminded of it in our daily lives, but what about the South African? How often is it mentioned? Are people so worried about forming a new “Rainbow Nation” or developing “democracy” that they are forgetting what happened in the past to get them to this point? How can we make sure that something like apartheid can never happen again, anywhere on this earth? The museum is a start to remember the wrongs committed by the apartheid government, but it’s not enough. South African politicians need to stop embracing liberalist tendencies and think outside the box to really meet the growing needs of the people in this country. The public education and health care systems need serious restructuring. Entire generations of people are suffering from unemployment because of poor education or dying because of lack of access to adequate health care. Failure to see such disparities and do nothing cannot create positive results. People will not stay downtrodden for long—not while the rest of the world moves forward.
RESPECT
DEMOCRACY
EQUALITY
RECONCILIATION
DIVERSITY
FREEDOM
RESPONSIBILITY
-printed on marble pillars outside of the Apartheid Museum
After we left the museum we headed over to Soweto. We stopped at a restaurant inside of the township to eat lunch. That was the first restaurant I had ever seen inside of a township. It took almost 2 and a half hours for everyone to get their food and get out. After that we drove around various parts of Soweto. I never realized how massive it was!
The first stop was the Hector Pieterson memorial and then Nelson Mandela’s old house. Mandela’s house was being remodeled so we couldn’t go inside of it, but we stopped and got out of the van to take pictures anyways. The Hector Pieterson memorial was built on the spot of the June 16th youth uprising, when children protested the use of Afrikaans as the medium of education in schools. As the children were protesting, police officers opened fire on the children, killing 23 and wounding hundreds. Hector Pieterson was among the youngest, being only 13 years old. It was chilling to see how the memorial had marked off where the police were firing and where the students were marching. As I closed my eyes I could almost feel the spirit of revolution those students felt as they were marching through Soweto, burning symbols of apartheid as they went. The same spirit still very alive in the country—the time needs to come when it is made known to the people again.
The next stop on our tour was Kliptown. Kliptown is the first actual squatter camp I have ever seen. It literally popped up our of nowhere in the middle of Soweto. People lived on top of one another in tin shacks or whatever they could piece together to find a house. Apparently the movie called “Tsotsi” was filmed there and won several awards, including an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year. Since Kliptown is technically an illegal settlement, they have no electricity, no schools, no plumbing, and no clinics. The only water source in the entire camp can be found in the middle, and everyone must share it.
We left Kliptown and visited the Freedom Charter monument. At the monument there was looked like an abandoned convention center. I went inside to find some random guys practicing gumboot dancing—the kind of dancing that men used to do in the gold mines of Johannesburg. I watched them for a bit, and then it was time to go. From there we drove through was it called the “Beverly Hills” of Soweto. Some of the most expensive homes there were R 1 million and above (about $150+ US). The value of the Rand is much below that of the dollar. It’s nice for tourists who can turn their US dollars into a lot of Rand, but a lot of things then go home, but it’s not so good for your average South African laborer who may only make something like R 50 (approx $7) a day! Sad as it is, it made me realize that if my family lived in South Africa, we could possibly be millionaires!
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