A heritage week — Soweto, Constitution Hill, Robben Island

Some places need time you haven’t allocated

We planned four days for the heritage trail — two in Johannesburg, one travel day to Cape Town, one on Robben Island — and used six. This was not the plan. On the second morning in Johannesburg, after the Apartheid Museum, we sat in the car park for forty minutes without speaking or doing anything in particular. Neither of us was crying, exactly, but neither of us was not crying either. We adjusted the schedule.

The apartheid heritage trail in South Africa is not comparable to any other heritage tourism experience we have done. The museums and memorial sites are not relics of a historical period — they document events within living memory, in a country where you will meet, in the same week, people who were interned in the Number Four Prison at Constitution Hill, families who walked away from the Soweto uprising, and former political prisoners who now guide tours at Robben Island. The sites are not interpretations of history. They are in conversation with it.

The Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg

The Apartheid Museum sits at the Gold Reef City complex south of Johannesburg, which is an odd address for one of the most serious museums in Africa — the theme park is adjacent, and on the morning we visited a rollercoaster was operating with audible enthusiasm three hundred metres away.

The museum itself is designed with deliberate disorientation. Entry is through separate gates marked “European” and “Non-European,” randomly assigned by ticket. You enter the experience as either a classified white person or a classified non-white person and the first rooms you pass through are different. The classification system — race and the arbitrary bureaucratic machinery through which it was enforced — is the museum’s first subject before it becomes the history of resistance to that system.

We spent four hours. This is not unusual; the museum’s depth does not compress. The section on the Rivonia Trial, the photographs of the Sharpeville massacre, the film on the Soweto uprising, the profiles of activists who were detained under Section 29 of the Internal Security Act (detention without trial, renewable indefinitely) — these are not brief exhibits. They require time and they earn it.

The immersive Apartheid Museum history tour provides a guide who contextualises the exhibits and can answer questions that the exhibit text alone cannot. We would take this option if we returned — the museum’s self-guided experience is excellent but a guide changes what you leave with.

Constitution Hill, Johannesburg

Constitution Hill was, until 1983, the Old Fort Prison complex — a facility that held, at various points, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and hundreds of thousands of Black and coloured South Africans in the apartheid period under conditions that are documented in the museum with specific, named, individually-profiled accounts. The Number Four building — the section for Black male prisoners — has been partially preserved and the tour enters cells that held multiple people per space designed for one.

The Constitutional Court of South Africa now occupies the site of the former Women’s Prison. The court’s entrance incorporates bricks from the demolished prison walls, its art collection was donated by artists from across the country, and its public gallery is open to visitors without booking when the court is not in session.

The juxtaposition — the place of incarceration and the place of constitutional rights, occupying the same site — is neither accidental nor subtle. It is the most architecturally and politically layered heritage site in South Africa. We spent three hours and regretted not having more.

The Constitution Hill and Apartheid Museum half-day tour covers both in one managed session, which is efficient but may leave visitors wishing they had more time at Constitution Hill.

Soweto: Vilakazi Street and the Hector Pieterson Museum

Soweto requires its own day. The Hector Pieterson Museum, named for the first child killed in the 1976 Soweto Uprising, is located on the street where the uprising began and contains the Sam Nzima photograph — the image of dying thirteen-year-old Hector Pieterson being carried by an older student, his sister running alongside — that became the most widely reproduced image of apartheid resistance internationally.

The museum itself is small and devastating. It contains oral histories from participants in the uprising, personal effects from those killed, and a documentary account of how what began as a student protest against Afrikaans as the language of instruction became the turning point of the resistance movement. We were the only visitors for the first twenty minutes and then a school group arrived from Soweto — not a tourist group, a local school — and the teachers moved the students through the exhibit with the specific tone of people showing their children the most important thing about where they live.

Vilakazi Street, two minutes walk from the museum, contains the Mandela House Museum and the adjacent house where Desmond Tutu lived — the only street in the world to have housed two Nobel Peace Prize winners.

Robben Island

Robben Island requires a day: the ferry from the V&A Waterfront takes approximately thirty minutes each way, tours on the island run two to two-and-a-half hours, and the full round trip is five to six hours including waiting time. Book in advance — significantly in advance during school holidays. The island runs on capacity limits and sells out weeks ahead.

The tour is guided by a former political prisoner. The guide in our group was a man who had served seven years on the island in the 1980s and who took us to his cell in B Section. He stood in the doorway of a space roughly two metres by two metres and talked about the dimensions, the single blanket per prisoner regardless of season, the system of privileges that governed whether you were allowed to study, and the period when Mandela was imprisoned in D Section, in a slightly larger cell because the prison management had determined that his longer sentence required different conditions.

This is the specific thing about Robben Island that cannot be replicated in a film or a book: being in the physical space, with a person who was in that space, is different. It is not comfortable. It should not be.