Apartheid Museum

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Quick coffee and skulk round the airport for breakfast and we'll be off to the Botswaanan border for a safari. Detouring to avoid where the poor miners tradegy happened. Made even more poignant after visiting the apartheid museum yesterday, which was absolutely brilliant.

Your ticket designated you white or non-white and split you into separate entrances, as a stark reminder of not only segregated public spaces, but families who were split through different racial classifications. The foundations of apartheid lay in the segregation of black farm workers and gold miners from the white bosses in the late 1800s. Then following WWII the influx of black and Asian people into urban areas frightened the white ruling powers.

In 1947 the government passed a law to prevent nonwhites from owning land. From then on a systematic break down of infastructure ensued, the most disheartening of which was the depletion of school services. Nonwhites were entitled to only 4 years of education, which focused on the preparation of black children for a lifetime of servitude of whites. Children in township schools crammed into classrooms of over 100 pupils, and received only 3 hours of education each day.

In 1976 school children protested against the compulsory use of only Afrikaans in the classroom (Zulu and English were the main languages used) which prevented most black children from accessing what little remained of the curriculum. Police opened fire on the protesting pupils, and the haunting picture of the young man carrying a blood soaked girl, and a young lady screaming became an emblem of the struggle in South Africa. This massacre sparked the anti apartheid protests that definedthe following decade, inspiring many ordinary men and women in the townships to protest against the regime.

Raids were systematic and the government passed amendments to hold suspects for 30, 100 and even 500 days without access to a lawyer or official charge. Detainees were tortured, and told they could be pushed through a window and it be made to look like suicide. In total 116 people died whilst being interrogated, the most famous of which was activist Steve Biko. Deaths in the townships through police raids were plentiful, and weekends were a time for mass funerals with dozens of township victims buried at a time.

Informants who often led police to these victims were given a necklace, a burning tyre strung around their necks, and left to die as a stark warning to others against turning state informant. Bowing to international pressure through rallies and embargos FW De Clerk freed all political prisoners within one month of taking office as President. After Mandela was freed more people died in the following two year's struggle to establish a ruling democratic power from within many different factions than during the whole of the apartheid regime.

It seems the Marikana massacre has stirred much of this history back to the surface, and frightened people that what was once lost has been found, and that once again South Africa must find a way to move forward without forgetting where it's been.

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Photos

Young man desperate to learn
Young black children were reduced to only 3 hours of school a day, in class sizes of around 100 pupils.

Students work on floor
Education in the black classroom was without desk, chairs and even paper due to government cutbacks.

Mandela's drive to freedom
The men at the East London, CT, Mercedes plant gave up their own free time to make this high-spec car for Mandela's drive to freedom after his release, as a gesture of thanks for everything he'd sacrificed.