South Africa Guide
Gauteng
The Apartheid Museum
Opening time: Tues– Sun 10am–5pm
Price: R25
Website: www.apartheidmuseum.org
Featuring separate entrances for "whites" and "non-whites" (your race is randomly assigned), this is truly a world-class museum, delivering a sophisticated visual history that is at once distressing, inspiring and illuminating. Give yourself plenty of time to view the permanent exhibition of photographs of the 1976 Soweto uprising, by Peter Magubane. Nor should you miss an exhilarating short documentary on the State of Emergency during the mid-1980s, when a wave of mass demonstrations and riots, though violently suppressed, shook the resolve of the regime.
The museum offers a nuanced insight into the deep social damage wrought by apartheid – and by colonial policies that long preceded it – and helps to explain the persistence of poverty and racial tension in the new South Africa. On the other hand, the museum's visual account of the jubilant advent of democracy serves to remind us how miraculous the transition was.