Welcome to Buckingham Guest House’s regular Johannesburg blog!  Each month, we will be reviewing a sight, destination, restaurant, cultural institution or other kind of attraction in our wonderfully historic and vibrant city.   We start with an account of one of the most important museums in the country, the Apartheid Museum, which has become justly world famous for its vivid and historically superb representation of South Africa’s infamous system of institutionalised racism, apartheid, which operated for much of the 20^th century.

Gold Reef City, Cradle of Humankind - Magaliesburg, Nelson Mandela Bridge and Johannesburg cityscape

Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum – a riveting human rights visit

This museum is of major international importance for its role in chronicling the development and day to day enforcement of apartheid, South Africa’s infamous policy of legalised racism.  Commonly associated with the 1948 electoral victory of the extreme Afrikaner Nationalist party, in fact apartheid had existed in earlier forms throughout the territory that became modern South Africa since the very first years of European presence in southern Africa.  The Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, for example, disallowed free movement of black and Asian communities, which were governed  by a ‘pass’ – the same hated ‘dompas’ imposed on black people during the mid-20^th century period, often termed ‘Grand Apartheid’.

Opened in 2002, the museum tells its story through a great richness of photographs, film and video clips, many of which were taken covertly by both sides of the anti-apartheid conflict.  The museum succeeds in capturing the scale and reach of the system, and in teasing out fascinating aspects of its complexity.  Some of these include: the role of South Africa’s mineral wealth and the economics underpinning the system; how the tools of censorship and propaganda were used; the tidal wave of grass roots rebellion during the 1980s; details of the apartheid government’s covert military actions; and the apartheid endgame, when many white citizens too began to openly rebel, particularly against being conscripted into the armed forces to police township unrest.

The museum may be contacted on 27+11 496 1822, or via its website: www.apartheidmuseum.org.za.  Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10h00-17h00.  There is an excellent coffee shop which also serves light food, and a good bookshop with many books on human rights, apartheid, South Africa and related topics

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