An Afternoon at the Apartheid Museum
To arrive in a new country by plane at night is to invite dissonance. The jetlag, the lethargy of sitting for hour upon hour chain-watching B+ grade movies. Landing. Then walking from the plane through the tunnel and into stale air, amongst perfume advertising of beautiful and well rested people. Then a flurry of action - the cold-war-ness of the passport check, the farm-animal at the feedlot of baggage retrieval then out into carhorns and traffic of some foreign night. Some unarticulated awareness that this is the instant you go from a carefully controlled and curated experience of a digitally tracked passenger into a world where, without phone, internet or even potentially language skills, there is the distinct possibility of vanishing without a trace.
Given the press of Johannesburg this feeling for once was acute. I stood kerbside at the airport’s pickup and watched with twitching and bagged eyes for my Uber. I’m well travelled enough to know tomorrow I would feel a bit silly about all this but for the first time I could not placate the rising anxiety as I had in other cities - no advice I received countervailed the established wisdom: the cold hard unmitigateable truth was out there was a country where 57 people were murdered every day and this city was South Africa’s theft capital.
The advice I did receive was far from reassuring: Do not walk around anywhere at night, never look at your phone in public and ensure your window was wound up at traffic lights. “Keep a gap between you and the car in front so you can always pull out and get away” Someone had said. Almost all people hanging around here were black so now it seemed this advice was alarmist and racist - yet I had no authority to contradict it nor did I have, in my frazzled state, weighed down by luggage, the ability to construct a contradicting argument of my own. Uncomfortable though this advice may be I would have to rely on it. When my Uber driver asked if it was ok to divert from Uber’s recommended route because that road was not safe at night, I agreed and stared out the window at the reflected lights spooling on the windscreen. I asked him if my area was safe to which he replied “It is high class sir.”
In the morning light I saw it was indeed high class which is to say an expensive fortress of an apartment complex. I got chatting with our security guard who explained the every hour he needed to touch small plastic sensors on the walls that would send a message back to security headquarters to verify he was patrolling the grounds. The walls were topped with barbed spikes and parallel lines of electrified wire. The daylight in South Africa is very bright like Australia’s, and although the soil seems a distinctive red, the Jacrandah trees made this territory appear familiar and I instinctively felt that it was safe. So I went for a walk.
With a rumble the rolling gate opened. More advice: only open your gate wide enough to step through and ensure it was fully shut again before I left. Outside had reinforced was I had been told - I was in a very rich area of Joburg, preened and mowed, still shiny from the 2010 World Cup. Yet everywhere spikes, barbed wire, electric fences and security guards. This area of the city was besieged and afraid. On my way to the restauranty area (as reported by Google Maps) I saw many black people walking along the street but no whites until I got to there - an entire suburb like one giant shopping mall.
I found a street-side restaurant and, served by a black waiter, I sat down and watched the street in front of me. I noticed most customers were white, while all service staff and security guards on all the restaurants were black. I knew enough about South African history to pose that this apparent racial disparity had historical roots in apartheid, yet I was conscious of confirmation bias here - reducing what I saw to reflect that tiny morsel of knowledge. Futhermore it seemed strange that 25 years after the official end of apartheid, with the economic upsets of globalisations that inequalities should have such a stark racial aspect to it. After all this area was exceptional as Africa’s richest square mile so it would be lazy to consider it representative of the whole country. I decided I needed to get some broader historical knowledge - so I booked a taxi to the Apartheid museum to try and discover some historical roots to what I saw before me.
The museum itself is a solemn yellow stone structure, positioned bizarrely next to the Gold Reef Theme Park. Upon paying your entrace you receive a ticket that randomly assigns you a race - either whites or non-whites. I recieved non-whites and as I approached the building I could see there were separate turnstiles to the main building, one with a “whites” sign another with a “non-whites” sign.
Beyond turnstiles are dark concrete halls through which the story of the birth of modern South African nation was told. It began with the aid of a video detailing the first 3500 years of Southern Africa through cave drawings. These were prehistorical tales of intertribal warfare and the relationship between man and the natural world. When white slave owners arrived it heralds the disruption, pain, oppression and slavery of Africans. The film quickly comes to slavery, the 1890s gold rush, the expulsion of the Afrikaners (the Dutch settlers) by the British for refusing to give up slaves. When the Afrikaners return they fight the British in the Boer war and beyond develop a fervent white nationalism, From this nationalism the film ends on the beginning of aparthied.
After this film, the exhibition describes apartheid, never losing sight of the humans involved, those, both white and black, that resisted it and those who were complicit and those that suffered. Rather than retell a story readily available in history books I can explain the aspects that made a deep impression on me, particularly because I still consider them relevant today.
- Racism + Poverty = Hatred - That the Boers saw themselves as superior to the Africans is a given but the exhibition also contained black and white images of their acute poverty. These images of white destititute families living in tents evoke images of American white poverty like Appalachia. It became clear to me that the development of an agressive white nationalism had its roots in the poverty of the Afrikaner’s experience under the British. Sandwiched as they were between the rich British and the poor black Africans, the Afrikaners considered themselves entitled to imperial levels of wealth. Apartheid and racial hatred was enabled for ordinary people by a sense they had been robbed of their birthright.
- Oppression arrives incrementally - One wall is dedicated to the names of laws passed to implement apartheid over 40 years. They have names, some of which sound benign like “Police amendment act”, “criminal procedure amendment act”, while others are as sinister to twenty-first century ears “Prohibition of mixed marriages act” and “emergency regulations”. It became clear to me staring at that wall, that what appears to be diabolical in retrospect is actually introduced piecemeal, one small increment at a time. It means that legislation that began as noble and fair can be slowly bent and twisted to justify and legally enforce horrific ends. The implication of this is that constant vigilance is required to uphold the the spirit of laws.
The birth of a black consciousness - It was deeply inspiring to anyone interested in resistance of any kind to watch the awakening of self-realisation of black South Africans as a cultural political force independent of European roots. In the beginning of apartheid, black South Africans were divided, utterly powerless and poverty stricken. Eventually leaders resist with a European democratic and liberal model of universal humanity. When this fails to get results a black consciousness movement is born. It casts off the imported religious and political modes of resistance to eventually develop a black purely African one. One television screen projected the powerful footage of the movement’s founder Steve Biko as he addressed a crowd about not wanting liberals to feel good about giving “us a nicer house. We want to do things for our own damn self.” This reveals true resistance is born of pride from confidence from identity and history. These are precursors to meaningful resistence.
Violence from the state comes from a position of weakness - Further into the exhibition - scenes of acute black poverty gave way to scenes of resistance which gave way to the white state’s reaction - violence. At the exhibition tourists gasped at footage of black south Africans being beaten, shot at with tear gas and savaged with dogs. Indeed it was confronting. Further on was a terrifying crowd control truck called the Casspir (see pic), grim holding cells and confiscated weapons. It is clear this escalation came the moment that the challenge to apartheid became a genuine threat. It’s a cliche but the state was operating from a real fear their grip on power would be upset.
More powerful still was nonviolence - After a long period in which black South Africans exhibited their rage through rioting and looting, beating and murdering. Their movement shifted - to nonviolent civil disobedience. With this, the laws that had held them in place for so long simply became unenforceable. By contrast the state’s use of police violence was revealed for what it was - a loss of control - which made it clear to all - the system was no longer legitimate.
The end of apartheid and reconciliation in South Africa was a deeply inspiring process - the exhibition made clear that the end of apartheid came with no guarantees of peace. The entire country was on the brink of a bloody civil race war. To end of apartheid required deep compromises on all sides - a process that seems alien by today’s combative politics. Especially when race is concerned. The reconciliation process required an honest confrontation and investigation of apartheid.
This final point, I believe, is an aspect that Australia can learn from South Africa with regards to our Indigenous history. We have gone part way to acknowledging our past but it is not enough. As the comic above hints at - without a broader awareness and universally agreed upon version of events - a dark history is always able to be used later leverage, from which society can be divided for political gain. This is clearly demonstrated in Australia - where a lack of consensus about our dark history with original inhabitants is used as a salient point in our culture wars. It is continuing to divide Australia into political factions and without hint of resolution it means that we are an unstable and disuninited society.
As I walked back out of the museum into the pink light of forming dusk, I felt deeply moved by the experience. I had a sense now of the injustice that black South Africans had experienced since the arrival of the white man. The untold misery inflicted - the lost cultures and ways of life pulled up by the roots and harvested in the most brutal dehumanising extraction in the service of greed. It was ugly it was shameful and it was genocide.
Beyond this the museum was also deeply inspiring - it was possible to see the seeds for renewal in the growth of a black consciousness and the reconciliation after apartheid.
The apartheid museum was also an experience that directly confronted me with the concept of white guilt and white privilege. It was as clear as a slap in the face walking through Johannesburg that an aspect of white privilege existed. It was also highly likely that a less extreme version existed to varying degrees throughout the developed world. I bristled with the injustice and I felt deep shame at how black people had been enslaved, murdered, with the lives of so many, living with the turmoil hundreds of years later. Yet these emotions did nothing to right this injustice. When a friend demanded that it be right I feel white guilt - it appeared a narcisstic impulse - for white people to once again place themselves at the centre of a black story - to extract their pain and tranform it into their emotion. Guilt alone never fixed anything. It seemed more appropriate to acknowledge the pain and go about educating oneself.
Later in the week I also visited the township of Soweto, the place where Nelson Mandella and Desmond Tutu had grown up, also the site where black student protesters demanding equal rights had been gunned down by police officers enforcing apartheid. We saw how those living in townships were forced to illegally tap water and electricity because the government did not make these available. It was only about 40 minutes drive from where I was staying in my compartively luxurious apartment. Clearly the economic aspect of apartheid was tenacious and lived on.
My point is that there was no correlation between checking privilege and connecting a Soweto shack with electricity or water. Guilt was pure self-indulgence if it failed to produce any meaningful change. While my very limited experience in South Africa’s exaggerated version of Western racial dynamics made it clear as day that white privilege does exist. But it revealled to me a deep hypocracy at the heart of Western internet liberalism, something that has dominated the lens by which I had viewed racial politics beforehand. Online liberalism seems utterly preoccupied with intentions, awareness and positioning over any concrete way of righting any injustice. It is as if purging oneself of white privilege and position in society can be achieved without the awareness of black people whatsoever, the tweeter, the clicktivist and their feelings given far greater importance than their subject. This is particularly gross because it again strips non-white people of their place in their narrative and sets the spotlight back again on the white person and their act of public masturbation - an act of self flaggelation at no real personal cost where the effluent of guilt is presumeably drained in public.