Thoughts on the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg

On my last day in Johannesburg a few months ago, I figured out how to use the mini-bus/taxibuses in which seem less efficient than the ones in Cape Town. I caught one on Main Road in Melville, took it to a bus station center in or near New Town (seeing some of these neighborhoods of inner-city Jo’burg during the day is so different from night, the dilapidated buildings, etc. are much more obvious in daylight), and took another one from there to Gold Reef City, where the apartheid museum is uncomfortably near an amusement park.

But the museum was great and only R40, and impossible to cover in the little more than two hours we had before meeting up with some friends. The Apartheid Museum had an entire temporary exhibit on Nelson Mandela, where I learned much more than I ever did about his past (his Xhosa background, his living in Alexandra and Soweto, his training/combat training in other parts of Africa such as Ethiopia, his loyalty to old friends and allies, such as Qaddafi, and his time in Robben Island, which I later visited).

The permanent exhibition, much larger and full of even more information than I could handle, included the history of Johannesburg, the gold mining industry, early urban history and the development of segregation and townships, the rise of apartheid, anti-apartheid icons and movements, and the transition to democracy. Since we had to move so quickly through this final part, I missed out and skipped over reading many parts of the end of the apartheid museum. But they did have some cool stuff, including a recording of Miriam Makeba singing, videos from Mandela speaking and other pivotal moments and interviews, and a picture of Johannesburg youths in the 1950s playing kwela music on the street.

Unlike the District 8 Museum in Cape Town, the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg is very impressive, detailed, and perhaps a little excessive, since it's impossible to really take in all that it offers (video displays, several rooms/halls of pictures, text, and features such as an entrance to the museum where one is classified by race and has to enter a different path based on that classification, a tribute to Nelson Mandela and the spirit of freedom, etc.). Of course, one could and should argue that the deification of Mandela, though he's such an easy and accessible symbol of freedom to people of all races, renders invisible the much larger social movements and organizations engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle, but overall the rest of the museum thoroughly covered the general movement quite well.

That said, it's one of my favorite museum experiences for it's extensive documentation of the entirety of the apartheid period, from the early foundations of Johannesburg and white minority rule to the formal onset of apartheid in the 1940s and ending with the release of Mandela from Robben Island, the gradual dissolution of de Klerk's apartheid government, etc. Another neat aspect of some of the deeper historical displays was pictures and life stories of individuals and their descendants who played a role in the growth of Johannesburg from gold rush to the end of the 20th century.

In summation, the Apartheid Museum was my finest museum outing in South Africa. I suppose the only large flaw I saw was the absence of significant coverage of the pre-colonial period and the history of white settler colonialism gradually leading to white dominance by the late 19th century of most of what is today South Africa. If I had to rank them, it would be this one as 1st, the Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto 2nd, and the National Gallery in Cape Town as 3rd. Unfortunately, I did not have a camera on me most of the time and one of the few photos I possess was taken by a fellow-traveller. I do not claim ownership of the above image in any way at all.