Apartheid Museum and Umoja Show

Just to start here is a picture of the view of the sunset from our house.


Today we went to the Apartheid Museum. I definitely didn’t get through all of the exhibits, and wish I had left more time for the end of the museum that displayed content of more recent political activity.

We had lunch at the museum’s café, and Katherine and I both ordered tea. In the spirit of the museum, our awesome waiter gave her the black cup, me the white one, and giggled about it.



A particularly powerful portion of the Museum was a series of images from Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage, a book that consisted of photos depicting life as a Black person during Apartheid. These images included miners being humiliated by being forced to strip naked and be searched in order to work, living conditions of one room consisting of fruit cases as furniture, neighborhoods being bulldozed to make room for white expansion, children sleeping head to toe on the floor at a clinic because they were not “serious” enough cases to warrant a bed, and pictures of people getting arrested for not having their pass cards with them. There was a photo of a line that would form starting at 5:30 am of people trying to get their pass cards, but if they didn’t get in the building in time they were then at risk of being arrested for not having their pass. At one point there were around 500,000 a year who went to jail for statutory crimes such as not having an identification pass.

These passes were based on the Population Registration Act of 1950 that required classifying every citizen by race into the categories of Black, Coloured, or White. Later it was expanded to include other categories such as Indian. At one point it became an option to appeal one’s categorization, or that of another person and have the racial categorization changed. These “chameleons” changed from Indian to Coloured, Coloured to White, Black to Indian, and almost every other combination imaginable. Sometimes family members would get classified differently, and be torn apart by the different laws for the different races.


There was also a Mandela exhibit, which was incredibly aesthetically appealing as well as meaningful, and what was most resonant for me was the part about his time in prison. Having just visited the prison at Constitution Hill, seeing the 131 nooses representing certain political activists killed by the government, and the rooms of solitary confinement in which prisoners were kept, I was astonished that it was in his time in prison in which Mandela moved away from any ideas of using militant mechanisms within the freedom fight. How did he suffer such horrors and still advocate for forgiveness?



One quote that was stated was from a fellow political prisoner, Mac Maharaj, who stated “Man can adapt to the worst of conditions if he feels he is not alone; if he feels like he has support in what he is doing.”

Tying back to our conversation earlier about forgiveness in the reconciliation process, I wonder about the role that justice plays not only in this setting, but also in any setting. Mandela was close to being sentenced to death during the Rivonia Trials, and thank goodness he was not because the world would have been different without him. Others such as Stephen Biko who weren’t as “lucky” in their interactions with the Apartheid era South African government. And yet capital punishment is something that is actively used in the States.

So some may say it is a different situation because we’re talking about political prisoners versus prisoners of another kind. As one of the exhibits said, Mandela is no ordinary prisoner. But what about the others? Who is a criminal? Slums in South Africa were seen as a place for disease, moral degeneration, racial mixing and therefore weakening of white supremacy. The poor are often considered dangerous and we therefore perceive them as dangerous and criminals.

Even in situations of criminals more “deserving” of punishment such as those who have committed violent crimes, where does forgiveness play a role? In the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa over 1000 participants of Apartheid, a system of physical and psychological violence, were granted amnesty. This is not even on the same scale as the petty drug crimes for which most of the prisons in the States are filled, it is genocide of entire communities. And yet forgiveness is advocated for progress in this situation while our own criminal justice system has hardly any decent rehabilitation system and concepts like restorative justice are not considered as legitimate options. So who gets forgiven, and who gets punished?

I didn’t leave myself enough time for the end of the museum, which I am disappointed about because those are the most recent occurrences, and those in which I am most interested including things like first gay rights parade in South Africa in October 1990.


To end our day, we went to a show called Umoja, meaning the spirit of togetherness. The show was AMAZING. The performers sang/danced/drummed their way through South African history, from tribal dances to gospel music. I couldn’t take pictures of the show, but here is some art that was on the walls.









And here is a link to see some of what they do:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af8Ah3cQv94