by Chrissy Iley
I am not really a museum lover. I find them a little dry. I am not even a gallery goer. I think because we are all so used to being in a multimedia age they seem a little flat.
The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg though was not like that. You see its towers before you get in, announcing Democracy, Equality and Reconciliation. You could be entering a stadium going to a U2 concert. You are not. But there is something that suddenly grips all of your senses.
The brochure says apartheid is exactly where it belongs, in a museum. But a trip here gives you a visceral hit that apartheid is more than just a memory. To start with you are permitted in only one side of the museum. My entry card said I was black, so first off I saw stories and pictures of only black people. This section ends but you take with you a sense of repression.
Thereafter I went into the Nelson Mandela exhibition. “To be free is not merely to cast off one`s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others”, so said Mandela in June 1999. You hear him speak, and see other things he said that will make you cry. But then seeing a park bench that says Blacks or Europeans only is a different sort of emotion.
It is sort of shocking yet this happened, and not so many years ago. It is a history full of fresh human pain. You see it in films, in pictures, in audiotapes, and here you feel you are in a cell about to be bludgeoned. It is not just a museum visit; it is an assault on the senses.
The brochure tells you the Apartheid Museum is a journey, not just a destination. A journey of understanding of freedom and equality. It may be the most important lesson you ever learn. It is not just a museum, it is something much more powerful.
We went to the museum on our first morning in Johannesburg. And from there on everything fell into place. We spent the rest of the day in Soweto. We toured around the townships in our little bus. There were 12 languages spoken and the population is 98.5 per cent black. It is home for 1,271,628 people within 1600 square miles. So it is not just a little suburb, it is very much its own nation.
In the streets we see everybody loves football. A lot of them seem to support Manchester United. There is an area called Vilikazi Street, that is thriving with lots of buffet restaurants, a mixture of tourist parties and locals.
The Nexdor serves a varying range in its buffet that always includes savoury rice, butternut squash, vegetables that are involved in a kind of curry, and lamb and chicken stews. Dessert is trifle, the old-fashioned kind, and ice cream.
Restaurant Vilikazi is another cosy, authentic restaurant that has a huge buffet selection. They always include various styles of pap, one is plain and white, kind of distressing, but when it is spiced up it is rather delicious. It is a buzzy area, a night to just drink in.
Once in Soweto you can visit Nelson Mandela`s house, the one he lived in before his arrest, or the Hector Pieterson Museum. We did neither of those but visited Lebo`s Soweto Bicycle Tours. A bicycle can get to other areas in the townships where the bus can`t go plus all the kids love bicycles. They like to wave at them and jump on them. Or if you don’t feel like a bike ride you can do it in a tuck-tuck, a sort of three-wheeled, electric cart.
Here we felt we were on a kind of cooking safari; we saw Soweto`s delicacies like chicken feet, which have been sold roadside. We also went into a restaurant which was like being in a trial in I Am A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here as they served bits of bull`s bottom and tongue and doused it with paprika. I am afraid it went untried by me. There were also about a million flies for added atmosphere.
Lebo told us that this area of Orlando used to be a men`s only area. During Apartheid there were all kinds of segregations and this was where the male workers would be put to work without their families until they made enough money to join them. They lived then as they live now, in small tin huts, and on the streets you see people selling large plastic bowls, which are for bathing and washing in. There were some women who live there now but the restaurant, which is cheap is used by the men who don’t want to cook.
The children like to give you whacking high fives as they run after the bicycles. There is an area of new flats that have been built; they lay empty and vandalized. The people of Orlando who live in corrugated huts are too afraid to move in to the brick and glass flats. For them the shadow of the Apartheid regime hangs too near and they are just afraid they will be punished.
That night we had dinner at Chaf Pozi, where you get searched for guns as you enter. The DJ played township jazz, hip-hop and house. You get barbecue and coleslaw and wine. Chaf Pozi is next to Orlando Stadium and close to the FNB Stadium so it is a good place for pre and post concerts or game. It is very – as one South African put it – vibey. It is a place to gently dance and forget you saw a new block of flats that the people in tin huts were afraid to move into.
The next day we did a walking tour of Johannesburg. Our guide told us that Johannesburg was no longer in the top 50 most violent cities in the world. He spoke passionately about its regeneration as we walked past Nelson Mandela`s Firm of Law, the court that tried him and a small piece of devastation caused by the filming of Avengers 2 that happened in the summer.
We went on to the Neighbourhood Goods Market, which was full of amazing street food and street cocktails. Vintage and designer wear were nestling for a place among paella, fried chicken and bunny chow (curry in a scooped out loaf of bread). The market is buzzy, alive with the new Johannesburg. It takes in every smell, every spice and remixes everything that was vintage into something new.