Rachele enjoyed and learned a lot in Jo'burg but glad to be back in Cape Town

Last week for our spring break trip we took sometime away from Cape Town to see other parts of South Africa. Our first stop was Johannesburg, on Monday we went to the Apartheid Museum. The Apartheid Museum was significant to me because it got me to start to realize how many people lost their lives during the Apartheid. Of course I knew people had died but walking through the physical timeline of the Museum made me realize how long the Apartheid struggle really was. Also, something at the museum that was interesting was the structure of the museum had a lot of symbolism, particularly the entrance. Not only was the entrance separated into a black and white entrance depending of the ticket you received but even a ramp we walked up steadily increased and narrowed to show the struggle of Apartheid.

Later that day we went to Constitution Hill where the Jo’burg Prison was and also where the current constitution court is. It was hard walking through the prison, especially the isolation cells and thinking that actually people were kept here. Prisoners were treated poorly here and human rights were constantly violated, it makes me wonder how prison today compares and if anything has really gotten better. 

I will say that the Constitution Court was one of my favorite places on the trip. There was so much symbolism that went into constructing the court. Outside of the courtroom was designed to look like you are under a tree because in many South African cultures conflicts were often resolved by elders under the shade of a tree. Inside the court is made of the bricks from the old prison where so many human rights and now constitutional rights were broken. The symbolism behind that is that the bricks are a reminder of what has occurred in the past so that it will not happen in the future. I also found it interesting how some of the seats for the public are higher up than the judges, which is atypical for a court room. This is to remind the judges and everyone in the room that we are all equal human beings.

On Tuesday we traveled to Soweto, the largest Township in South Africa. Here our first stop was the Mandela household. It was crazy to see the bullet marks and smoke marks outside of the house where it was often attacked. From there we travelled down the road to the Hector Pieterson Museum. I enjoyed all of the photography in this museum. This museum was dedicated to those who fought for educational rights during apartheid. The Soweto uprising was an uprising by mainly the youth against an Apartheid law that made Afrikaans the language that all schools had to teach in. For Black South Africans, Afrikaans is seen as the language of the oppressor so they rebelled. During the march against this new law, many unarmed people and children were shot by the police, the first to fall was 12 year old Hector Pieterson. There’s a famous picture of his bodied being carried away from the shooting and I spent a very long time looking at it and wondering how it got to the point where children were being shot at.

The next day we took a trip to Sharpville. During the Apartheid people were made to constantly carry passbooks that would identify your race classification. If you were found without your passbook you would be sent to jail. In Sharpville there was an uprising where people marched to the local police station without their passbooks to be arrested, hoping to fill the prison over capacity. It’s said that a young police officer got nervous by the crowd and fired a shot. This started the Sharpville Massacre. 69 people died that day while 180 were injured. Many of the people were shot in the back as they turned to run away from the violence. What happened in Sharpville became very real when we went to the cemetery where all the victims were buried, many of them children.

For our last day in Jo’burg we went to a boys and girls club to help them prepare for a braai.

Friday we headed to Kruger Park! Some of the most memorable animals I saw here were lions, an elephant, giraffes, hyenas, kudu, impala, zebra, jackals, and more! Kruger was a great experience because the animals there were truly wild. I really wanted to see a leopard but not seeing one was reassuring at the same time because it meant that these animals had enough space to roam that they could go their whole life without seeing a human.

           

Overall, I enjoyed my time in Johannesburg. I personally felt like it was different from Cape Town in the sense that I wasn’t as comfortable. Needless to say I learned a lot that week from the museums and experiences I had but, I am happy to be back in The Mother City.