The long road to freedom

Kalpana Sunder

The journey starts with the ticket issued by the museum itself — it reads Whites/Non-Whites. And depending on your ticket, you enter a different revolving gate. Walking through the entrance to the museum, your eyes are drawn to cages that contain blown up copies of the dreaded passes and racially tagged identity cards which had to be carried by the Black population during the apartheid period. The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg portrays the rise and struggle of the Blacks to overthrow the notorious, state-sanctioned racial segregation called apartheid from 1948 to 1994 — it extended to land ownership, schools and colleges, public transport and governed almost every facet of South African life.

Visitors walk along an outdoor path, lined with mirrored images of diverse people, who came to South Africa in 1886, after the discovery of gold in Johannesburg.

The museum uses dramatic lighting and gloomy, stark spaces to portray the dark history. The museum has 22 exhibition areas from ‘Apartheid’ and ‘The Homelands’ to ‘The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, which use film clips, newspaper clippings, photos, information boards and artefacts to give the visitors an insight into life during apartheid.

The journey starts from the 1800s in the gold fields, moving on to segregation, violence against the injustice and ends with the election of Nelson Mandela as President and a new constitution. There is a map of Johannesburg from 1897 where the White planners had already divided the city by race with neighbourhoods divided by a railway line, and named Native location, Coolie location, etc.

A large board displays the 50 acts of apartheid — legislation that curtailed the Blacks in every sphere of life. There are spine-chilling reconstructions of prison cells and solitary confinement — one room has 131 nooses dangling from the ceiling to recall the political executions during apartheid. There’s a cage full of deadly weapons, used by the security forces during conflicts. There are images of Jan Smuts and J.B.M. Hertzog, the politicians who established racial segregation. There are brilliant images by Black photographer Ernest Cole, who documented what life under apartheid was for Black South Africans — it is said he smuggled his camera in a paper lunch bag and entered mines and other place to shoot his images. His book was banned during apartheid and it was after his death that the world saw his brilliant work.

‘The Turn to Violence’ section shows how organised resistance to the country’s racial segregation reached its pinnacle on Monday, March 21, 1960, in Sharpeville, during a demonstration against the pass laws. Watching a documentary about the riots in 1976 in Soweto, when the White government attempted to enforce the Afrikaans language which was met by student protests, one is drawn into the time when dodging the police bullets and teargas was the order of the day. The uprising was crushed but it became a turning point in the liberation of South Africa.

The exhibition that’s very special is the temporary one that traces the life of the great titan — Nelson Mandela. There are videos playing on a loop — one particularly moving interview with Mandela for the BBC is from the time he was in hiding from the authorities in the 1960s. Mandela states simply, “South Africa is a country of many races, there is room for everyone.”

A video of Mandela in a Springbok jersey at the Rugby World cup is thrilling — a defining moment as rugby was a White man’s preserve till that point! The largest artefact is a rich red Mercedes Benz presented to Madiba as he was known when he left prison, made by the workers in the assembly plant in East London.

At the very end of your visit, you reach a quiet, tranquil space with a glass case which contains the post-apartheid constitution and a pile of pebbles on a floor. The New Constitution has inscriptions of the core values of the new South Africa. They are the same words that appear on the Pillars of the Constitution at the museum’s entrance — ‘Democracy, equality, reconciliation, diversity, responsibility, respect and freedom.’ You can express your feelings for the victims of this phase by placing your own pebble on a pile.