Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 4 | The History of South Africa: A Twice-Told Tale (low bandwidth)

This year, South Africa celebrates the 10th anniversary of the end of apartheid. At the same time, the country is trying to reassess its troubled history and find ways of acquainting students with the past.

The 208 black junior high school students from the Itltleng Bakgolong Middle School are
obviously glad to get off the non-air-conditioned bus after a three-hour drive in the hot spring sun from South Africa’s Northwest Province to Johannesburg. But almost as soon as they finish stretching from the long ride, they immediately begin nudging one another and pointing
fingers at the building they are here to see.

The object of all this attention? The signs for entry to South Africa’s new Apartheid Museum—signs indicating separate entrances for whites and blacks.

“Today,” announces tour guide Peter Kgara, “some of you will have the opportunity to be white.”

The students giggle nervously behind their hands. The reaction is typical among students, the
largest group of visitors to the museum. White visitors normally are ushered in through the “Nie Blankes,” or Non-White door, while black visitors are shown through the entrance marked for “Blankes.” This introduction to the museum, directors explain, is to remind visitors of the rigid racial demarcations of nearly all aspects of life.

But this day, the black school kids are divided between the doors equally. A hush falls over the students as they are led into the museum for a three-hour examination of apartheid history. “South Africa is not a complete country,” Kgara says as the students wind their way through the museum’s entrance, a series of bars and cages designed to create a feeling of constriction and foreboding—even oppression—precisely what museum officials say is needed to begin an exploration of apartheid. “Our nation,” Kgara continues, “is a work in progress. We have those who want to contribute. Those who are neutral. And those who are stuck in the past.”

Kgara’s comments seem born out of a growing tension in South Africa that surrounds the country’s recent history. When the black majority government won elections in 1994, after 50 years of legally entrenched segregation and 400 years of colonialism, there was not one statue, monument or museum created by, or named for a black South African anywhere in the country. Not one.

But now, ten years after the end of apartheid, issues of heritage and history are exploding with a vengeance in South Africa. Unlike other societies after revolutionary change, such as post-Communist Europe and some liberated African countries, no statues were immediately pulled down following South Africa’s liberation. No walls were smashed. There was no rush to rename cities and streets, or instantly write new histories. Here, the culture of negotiation that led to democracy in 1994 is being followed in pursuit of a new history.

Under apartheid, history teachers had two choices: the version of the Afrikaners—the descendants of German, Dutch and French Huguenots—or they could choose history as written by the descendants of British settlers. In both accounts, Africans, when mentioned at all, were treated as if they didn’t exist before they were subjugated by whites.

After conquering the native population, European settlers proceeded to rename many of the cities, villages, rivers and mountains after places from their homelands. Europeans even took to renaming Africans themselves. But gradually, inevitably, inexorably, the black government has turned its attention to issues of heritage and history. And it is exposing all the cultural and racial fault lines still very much in place in post-apartheid South African society.

The Apartheid Museum is just one of a number of broad-based initiatives by the South African government and the society at large aimed at redressing what they feel was their virtual exclusion from the symbols and substance of their country’s history. And even here, at the museum designed to expose an international crime against humanity, there is a reflection of the bitter divisions still remaining.

To begin with, the museum attracts very few white Afrikaners, the group that perhaps feels the most alienated in the scramble for new historical definitions. “We have some young Afrikaner university students,” says museum director Christopher Till. “They come through, mostly with negative comments, like we’re one-sided. But we don’t get the vast majority of average Afrikaners.”

The museum, like the mushrooming collection of other South African heritage sites, seems a huge success with black students. But the message has had to be modulated for them. Fourteen-year-old student Eddie Tabotapi, who attends a multiracial school in Johannesburg,offers one explanation of why that is. “Our class visited the Apartheid Museum,” he reports. “When we left, you could see the white students were not impressed. When they saw pictures of black people hanging, they didn’t seem to care. Some of my white classmates were friends, but when we came out, they seemed different to me. One white classmate said he would call me tomorrow and I looked at him with anger.”

Lynn Abrahams is a former history teacher and provincial leader of the Youth League of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). She now is Educational Coordinator for the Apartheid Museum.

“In the beginning,” she says, “we ran pilot programs to see if we needed an age limit, and how to deal with the kids. Most of the black children from those pilots left here feeling angry and they hated the white people. And white children were saying they were ashamed of being white. We realized we had to change the tour guide narration and set some age limits for some of the exhibits.”

The changes are reflected in guide Peter Kgara’s presentation. Midway through the museum tour, Kgara stops at an exhibit entitled: “White Opposition to Apartheid,” which lists many of the whites who fought the system of racial domination.

In between exhibits, Kgara mentions earlier encounters with black students who spoke of wanting revenge after viewing the depredations of apartheid. He says, “I told them, ‘Do you want to be like the Boers? We are not here to promote bitterness. Don’t go out of here full of anger.’ Not all whites supported apartheid,” Kgara adds. “And not all blacks opposed it.”

Educational coordinator Lynn Abrahams says the Apartheid Museum has also been cathartic for her. “When I started working here, because of my political background, I didn’t trust white people. I almost hated them. For me, this museum was a kind of healing. This has given me hope and allowed me to redirect the anger and hate, because it was hate that almost killed my country.”

Two Memories, Two Memorials
For many South Africans, the clearest symbol of that hatred is the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. The Voortrekker was built in 1938 on a mountaintop approach to the country’s capital, Pretoria, as a testament to Afrikaner history, especially the defeat of black kingdoms during the whites’ movement into the interior as they fled British domination.

Gert Opperman, a retired general in the apartheid military, describes how, in 1838, 464 Boers fought and defeated more than 15,000 Zulu warriors. “The Voortrekkers took a vow that if God gave them victory over the Zulus, they would always commemorate that day as a Sabbath.”

Opperman says the monument, dedicated on the 100th anniversary of the victory over the Zulus, is the Afrikaners’ most important heritage site, and, in post-apartheid South Africa,
is their “emotional home.” When Opperman took over the monument in 1999, attendance was at an all-time low. “Many Afrikaners did not want to associate with the monument,” he says. “They were not proud of it.” This led Opperman to a total overhaul of the monument’s approach. “We brought in professional sound management, upgraded services and facilities. And we embarked on marketing programs aimed at the previously disadvantaged, especially the schools.”

The campaign has been a huge success—so much so that, ironically, the very survival of what many view as a tribute to apartheid, today almost totally depends on the patronage of black school children.

On one rainy day, two busloads of black students visit the monument from Angana High School, located in what used to be called the Northern Province before the new local black government changed its name back to Limpopo. Adam Netonane, one of the school’s history teachers, says he had no reservations about bringing black children to the Voortrekker Monument, from which blacks were banned until the early 1990s.

Next page: After conquering the native population, European settlers proceeded to rename many of the cities, villages, rivers and mountains after places from their homelands. Europeans even took to renaming Africans themselves.

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