The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg has a global contemporary museum design to convey the most objective information without making demands that visitors work hard to understand. It was an easy museum to visit in terms of how much I had to think to be able to understand the exhibits. For anyone who wants the museum to challenge them there are striking exhibits to consider further. The various rooms of the museum have designs which encourage some touching, walking around exhibits, looking up and down, and backing up to double check what previous exhibits said to put later exhibits in context. Overall there was innovative museum presentation and every section is a memorable experience.
The museum opens with an exhibit profiling local descendents of Johannesburg residents of diverse backgrounds from generations ago. The people profiled all have ancestors who were successful enough to have left community records, often from having professional but modest businesses. The intent is to communicate that South Africa today is an internationally connected country because of a pre-modern history of globalization.
The museum goes forward telling the story of apartheid starting in the early 1800s and moving forward in time. I hardly know this story, but it seems that in the early 1800s the British had slaves in South Africa. The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 ended slavery but colonial forces compelled former slaves and many other local black people to labor in horrible conditions. They quashed any attempts for anyone native to accumulate wealth or advocate for laborers. I have no understanding of how the Labor Movement in Europe or the Americas related to whatever the people in South Africa wanted at that time. Surely there must have been some connection. Every country must have stories. I was surprised at how much the museum emphasized the origins of the 1948 apartheid as union busting in the 1800s, but this makes a lot of sense.
Going forward in time apparently the colonial ruling class only became more awful, with successive generations accepting each present reality as an ethical baseline and feeling comfortable making changes to become more racist and oppressive from that point. There is a room in a museum listing laws which take rights away from black people and give privileges to white people. Following this list is a room full of nooses to represent the political dissidents executed for advocating for black rights. The museum has some solitary confinement prison chambers which it says were for breaking the wills of those whom the white people wanted to communicate terror stories back to their black communities. I walked into one of these chambers and shut the door to see what it was about. I am not aware of being particularly claustrophobic but being in that tiny featureless room was enough to trigger an instinctual terror response that I did not know I had.
There is an armored vehicle which police used to threaten demonstrating crowds with violence. Everywhere there are stories of violence. Moving forward to the 1980s are interesting posters and records of how people in other countries, including London and New York, held demonstrations and public rallies in support of an end to apartheid. There is an exhibit about how various civil rights causes tied themselves to the apartheid struggle, such as by advocating for labor rights, women’s rights, LGBT+ rights, or all rights plus no apartheid.
Toward the end of the museum there is an explanation of a concept called Truth and Reconciliation. The idea is that when one group harms another, the apology process should include a restorative justice process which encourages anyone who experienced harm to tell their story and to be part of an aggregate community who define the historical record of the situation. Along with that there has to be restitution where the people who benefited from the oppression compensate the people who were harmed by the oppression.
The Apartheid Museum is part of the Gold Reef City complex including a casino, a theme park, and a hotel targeting tourists. It seems odd to combine a serious museum with typical recreational spaces but maybe it works, or maybe the location is generally convenient. Do people leave the casino and go to the Apartheid Museum? I wonder what is more likely – losing a lot of money then wanting to learn about apartheid, or winning a lot of money then learning about apartheid? Do people learn about apartheid then feel like gambling? Does thinking about the apartheid put people into the mood for riding a roller coaster? The arrangement of everything would make it easy for someone to leave the hotel relaxed, bet on the roulette wheel, contemplate apartheid then ride the roller coaster.