Apartheid Museum
Powerful museum telling the story of apartheid in South Africa and the struggle against it.
The Apartheid Museum opened in November 2001 beside the Gold Reef City complex in Ormonde, south of central Johannesburg. It was built as part of the social responsibility commitments attached to the licence for the neighbouring casino development and is run as an independent non-profit institution. The museum sets out the history of twentieth-century South Africa, tracing how racial segregation was entrenched in law after 1948, how resistance to it developed, and how the country moved towards its first democratic elections in 1994.
The building was designed by a consortium of South African architects and is partly sunk into the landscape as a long, low complex. Its materials include rock-filled gabion walls, dry-stacked stone, raw plaster, off-shutter concrete and red face-brick, set among indigenous grasses and reflecting ponds. Visitors are issued tickets marked 'white' or 'non-white' at random and enter through separate gates, while seven concrete pillars at the entrance carry values drawn from the Constitution, including democracy, equality and reconciliation.
The permanent exhibition is arranged in a sequence of spaces covering race classification, the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, the political trials of the 1960s, the Soweto uprising of 1976, states of emergency in the 1980s and the negotiations that ended apartheid. It draws on film footage, photographs, documents and artefacts. Separate galleries are devoted to the lives of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the museum also mounts temporary exhibitions, runs school programmes and hosts public dialogues and commemorative events.
Highlights
- Randomly assigned 'white' and 'non-white' entrances recalling race classification
- Seven entrance pillars inscribed with values from the South African Constitution
- Permanent exhibition tracing apartheid from its origins to the 1994 elections
- Dedicated galleries on the lives of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu
- Semi-buried building of gabion, stone and concrete set in indigenous landscaping
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