I visited the Apartheid Museum on Tuesday with the Beyond Borders Road Trip crew from the States and Nieu Communities (a new monastic community based in Pretoria North). The entire day was very interesting! There were times when it was great to "hide" amongst white Americans and to blend in - I felt some people spoke more freely because of that - but being the only white South African male in a group of around 20 was also interesting - and challenging - because of the context.

But I get ahead of myself. The museum is designed well - pretty stark, very modern - and some of the typography arrangement was something I had to photograph (! - that's the designer part coming out), which was precisely when we were asked not to. Some requests are easy to ignore.

Technorati Tags: Nieu Communities, apartheid, South Africa

The emphasis on the present was creatively and tastefully done. It's tempting to relegate something like apartheid into the past, being grateful it's over while enjoying some inspirational stories, and missing the real impact is has on people living right now. How the Museum attempted to avoid that was to make things personal, so for instance instead of just a picture of Walter Sisulu in a section along the wall detailing many people's stories during that time, the main element the eye is drawn to is a colour picture of his granddaughter with Sisulu's details behind her (this exhibit was a single compartment in an elongated box along the wall). This says that Sisulu's story is continuing through his granddaughter - not that she is continuing his specific work per se, but that he was a part of an unfolding story and now she takes her place in that story as it continues to be written.

Also in that exhibit was the first Chinese man to play golf in Johannesburg (his dad had married a Xhosa woman) and a black immigrant worker from Mozambique who was harassed by police so much he eventually joined the police force for some peace and quiet (some rather serious things are not without humour!). Both of these compartments had prominent present-day pictures of their sons on the front. Also containing some humour was an article from The Star (in 1985?) which detailed around 500 people who had officially swapped race. The government decided they were incorrectly classified as a certain race (white, black, coloured, Indian and Asian) so miraculously some blacks became coloured, some Asians became Indian, some whites became coloured etc etc - all on the basis of their skin. Some things are so ridiculous they're wildly funny (although, not so much at the time?).

Some statistics pointed out that black workers who worked on the gold mines in Johannesburg were paid almost a tenth of their white counterparts (early 20th century). Even then - a good 50 years before structural apartheid - people seemed to have a good idea of what other people were worth. Maybe apartheid was our government putting into words what the people already believed...and perhaps it at first was. I know a few white South Africans who say "our biggest mistake was to make apartheid official" - meaning that we still should have done all of that segregation stuff but just not written into the laws of our land. It would have got us much less international condemnation and who knows - maybe we'd still have it now. "After all," they say, "that's what America did." ... (I'll write more on that in a later post as America does not have a rosy human rights history at all, especially when it comes to racial issues.)

But I don't buy that. It's just saying, "Those people are different and I don't really want to play with them..." We're all playing in this one big playground but everyone is in their own little group (which are defined by in/out language - "You're in, they're out") which is suspicious of the other groups. That just seems unhealthy to me (of course, this is replicated on the scale of nations, down to race/gender/intelligence/wealth/class and more especially nastily in denominationalism in Christianity...*sigh*).

What was interesting is when Jan Smuts and H.F. Verwoerd (?) were trying to improve on an earlier (and more open) form of apartheid (Smuts idea was to loosen it further, Verwoerd's was to tighten it) the tension they faced was that since there was such an overwhelming majority of black people in South Africa, to give everyone equal rights would only completely marginalise white South Africans. It would be white South Africans (who had the voting power) allowing their disenfranchised counterparts to have the same rights as they did, which meant giving up power. Power is not willingly relinquished by those who hold it - after all, when you hand over the whip to the one you've been whipping, you expect the worst. And some (most?) whites did expect that (I remember a comment in December 1993 - just before our first democratic elections - "Enjoy it - this is our last white Christmas!") but the miracle is the worst didn't happen.

(Why did the South African government wait until it was almost too late before relinquishing power? And what would have happened if that power had been reliquished - not in the late 1980's, but in the 1950's? Are we seeing a similar trend in businesses and the church, where the currently powerful (take your pick: church leaders, Western Christian, conservative majority American Christians) holds on to power for too long?) Never before in the history of the world has such a dramatic shift of power been made without accompanying widespread bloodshed...and we need to ask, "Why?". It says something about the people of South Africa, especially those who could have easily abused their hard-won power. And because the answer to that "Why?" contains something transcendent, something of God.

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