‘I cried because she was there, she suffered and it is something we feel in all of our hearts.’ Mark Gevisser watches white and black children at the Anne Frank exhibition
‘HOW many people lived in this room?” asked a Standard Nine pupil from Sebokeng’s Residentia High School as she entered a reconstruction of Anne Frank’s hideaway bedroom. When she heard that the Frank shared the room with a 45-year-old dentist, she laughed: “Ooh, that girl should have come to stay with us in Sebokeng. Four of us to a room this size.”
But she, like all the other high school pupils passing through the “Anne Frank in the World” and “Apartheid and Resistance” exhibitions at MuseumAfrica in Johannesburg, got the message: “It’s terrible what happened to the Jews. It’s just like what happened to us blacks in this country.”
It’s a comparison that would please the organisers, whose adjacent exhibition deliberately places Anne Frank’s story in a South African context by juxtaposing it with this country’s history of discrimination.
The children from Residentia clustered round the “Apartheid and Resistance” exhibition, mounted by the University of the Western Cape’s Mayibuye Centre. They were particularly moved by the photograph of a youth carrying the body of Hector Pietersen, the first victim of the 1976 Soweto uprising. Their response was utterly different from that of the white children visiting on the same day.
Caught alone looking at the Pietersen photo, Jeff Sibbert of Springs Boys’ High admitted: “I didn’t know there was such violence. It’s so important to remember. We can’t be allowed to forget this.” But, when together, the boys from Springs kept a safe distance from the Mayibuye exhibition — and in their written comments at the end of the tour, only one of them even mentioned the installation and apartheid’s parallels with Nazi Germany.
The reaction of Standard Nine pupils from Kempton Park’s Sir Pierre van Ryneveld High School was more complicated. They also kept their distance, but many — like Vanessa Malan — felt: “We need to learn from history. If we had learnt from the example of Nazi Germany, apartheid wouldn’t have happened here.”
Candice Venter wrote: “You don’t realise the seriousness of racism and prejudice until you see and hear the true-life story of some of the victims of apartheid and anti-Semitism.”
But the majority of the Kempton Park pupils noted in their comments that the exhibition was one-sided. “What about all the bad things the ANC has done?” asked Lauren. “Why isn’t that up here? How about when they came in from over the border, from Mozambique, and blew up landmines that killed a lot of people?”
Such comments might be factually selective (the notion, for example, that ANC cadres originated from outside South Africa), and their defensiveness might mask a sense of shame or victimisation by the white pupils. But they point to the fact that the Mayibuye Centre has missed a great opportunity. Instead of engaging viewers in the history of apartheid, it has mounted didactic and heavy-handed collages — struggle-posters, in fact — that distance the viewer by not allowing personal points of entry.
Even those black children who were moved and outraged by the Mayibuye installation referred more often than not to the Anne Frank exhibition when talking about apartheid.
Elizabeth Koetle found the Anne Frank exhibition “painful” and said: “It brings back a lot of memories.” Watching the video of Anne Frank’s life, she said: “I cried. But I didn’t cry because she was Jewish. I just cried because she was there and she suffered, and it is something we feel in all of our hearts.” This echoes the comment of another Residentia pupil, who wrote of Anne Frank’s Nazi-occupied Holland: “I’ve never been to such a place, but it’s as if I’ve seen it many times before.”
The way the black pupils saw Anne Frank’s story through the prism of South Africa’s own experience of oppression and redemption was fascinating. One Residentia pupil wrote that “Anne Frank is still the same with Mr Nelson Mandela. They did well with reconciliation.”
And, wonderfully (if rather naively), a negotiated settlement has sunk in to some young minds as the only solution to conflict. Johanna Litho-kanyane of Residentia wrote: “If the Jews had joint together and try to negotiate with Hitler, maybe it might get better. And all the situation might have changed.”
Nicodemus Letebele from the elite St Barnabas College in Bosmont found a lesson for budding democracy, noting that “the Nazis elected Hitler to take them out of a situation of depression and unemployment. But then Hitler used that power to get something to satisfy himself and forgot about the people.
“It teaches us as the future generation a lesson. If we elect someone it is up to us to hold them responsible.”
The St Barnabas children sat rapt as holocaust survivor Zipora Zygielbaum recounted her story. One wrote: “I’ve suddenly realised how people have suffered and how insensitive I’ve been … After having spoken to the survivor of six camps, I see how trivial all the pain, depression and suffering I’ve been through is.”
They didn’t want the blow-by-blow details of Zygielbaum’s story; rather they wanted to know how she coped with her own history. “What made you want to carry on living?” one pupil asked in amazement. “Why didn’t you just give up hope?” Later one St Barnabas pupil noted, with some perplexity, that Zygielbaum seemed to “look back with nostalgia. She doesn’t seem bitter. I just think of my father, who is so bitter …”
Like most of the pupils, black and white, she was struggling, through the exhibition, with the dialectic of truth and reconciliation. How do we deal with our past?
Written comments from the Residentia pupils were filled with exhortations to peace: “Let’s all be one nation, one heart, and have the same spirit of reconciliation” and “Let us not disappoint the new South Africa”.
Some display the same surprise at the excesses of Nazi Germany that the white children show at the excesses of apartheid South Africa: “Why does the Germans want to kill the Jewish,” wrote a Residentia pupil. “I think it is cannibalism. Hitler killed people because they were clever than him?”
The Sir Pierre van Ryneveld children also articulated shock at images or histories they had not previously considered, but often with a rider: “People should stop thinking of the past but to focus on a clearer future.”
And they were conscious of the vagaries of history. “If Hitler had won,” said one pupil, “we would have seen a very different exhibition here today. And if whites were still in power,” she added, pointing to the Mayibuye panels, “there would have been a different point of view.”
Perhaps the unrealised potential of the juxtaposition of these two exhibitions is to be found in a less articulate response — from a Residentia pupil who wrote on his comment-slip the following list: “26 June; Freedom Chater (sic); ANC; Anne Frank; JEW.”
* Black and white children at the Anne Frank exhibition is the subject of Weekly Mail TV’s Ordinary People next Thursday night on TV1