If you are a person interested in history, or someone who was shocked upon hearing the story of the South Africa’s past, then the city of Johannesburg gives you an incredible opportunity to experience the gruesome past first hand in what is called the Apartheid Museum located in the Golden Reef City. The name itself suggests prominently that the Museum is closely related to the apartheid era of the nation marked by darkness and pain, sacrifice and racism that prevailed during this era. Although the nation has now seen a phase of awakening, the horrific experience and hours of the time is recreated over and over again in the museum which you can feel and see through an Apartheid Museum tour.
The Apartheid Museum tour does not take more than a half day’s time but this little time is enough to keep your senses completely shaken up with horror and awe and complete admiration for those who have overcome the period, honor for those who sacrificed everything to get rid of the shackles put on them through racism during apartheid and empathy for them who lost the loved ones in a battle of the blacks and whites.
You can get in touch with a local tour provider to help you arrange for an Apartheid Museum tour but if you wish, you can even go on own to delve into the tragic past that is depicted in every corner of the museum. The very first of your resentment and perplexity will begin at the entrance when you will handed over tickets that look like cards but will be given out separately to blacks and whites as marked on them Hence, depending on your race of belonging to the Blacks or whites, you will given the appropriate cards. The primary aim of the museum is to tell the tale of sorrows suffered in apartheid and recreate it in you to make you realize exactly what they felt.
On your entrance, you will led through numerous rooms of various shapes and sizes, each depicting a particular era, beginning from the birth of South Africa, to the development of Soweto townships, uprising of Soweto to the repression and brutal torture, and the civil wars that followed bringing death before coming out in the peaceful room sheltering the constitution of the nation depicting the birth of the democratic government.
The most striking features of the museum that you will discover during your Apartheid Museum tour are the numerous metal cages with blown up photographs and artifacts of those tortured and hated racial ID cards and more than one hundred and twenty nooses hanging from the roof symbolizing the activists who were hanged during the period. These give you a feeling that the period of apartheid was not only dreadful but also sinister. Housed in other parts of the museum are numerous newspaper clippings, weapons, film footage shown on multitudinous monitors and photographs that scream out the stories in pain and at a moment you will believe you are one them, wreathing in despair.
When your tour ends and you come out in the open spaces of the garden surrounding the museum, you will feel relieved but also come out wiser than before, having shared the confines of the souls that struggled to be free.
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