As the Apartheid Museum opens it doors, John Matshikiza wonders what will make the turnstiles spin
Erecting a building that is to house the whole history of apartheid might seem a little premature. Are we really ready to announce the end of apartheid? Are we confident enough to encapsulate it as a piece of dead history and turn it into a museum piece, as distant as the mummified remains of Egypt, Greece and Rome?
The race has been on to get the Apartheid Museum up and running in time for the slightly delayed deadline of the end of November. The red brick building now looms out of the bruised landscape of south Johannesburg, hard up against the last remaining mine dumps those man-made hills that used to stand out against the sky like the key signature of this gold rush town.
The gold is all but gone and the mine dumps are fading away as the mining companies extract the last remaining fragments of priceless metal, like scavengers revisiting their own carefully hoarded spoils.
Only Gold Reef City remains as a memorial to a harsh, forgotten era of booming prosperity. And now, of course, the Apartheid Museum.
The juxtaposition of these two monuments to Johannesburg’s brash past is no accident. Both were conceived and nurtured into life by Solly and Abe Krok, Johannesburg’s legendary, wickedly entrepreneurial boomtown twins.
Gold Reef City you can understand a theme park in the Disney mould, a recreation of the Wild West on the African savannah, with carousel rides and exotic dancers thrown in for good measure. Gold Reef City is pure entertainment.
But an Apartheid Museum? What’s the attraction? What is there in revisiting the dreary horrors of racial segregation that is going to make the turnstiles spin? And, to go back to my opening question: who says apartheid is dead, anyway?
The first impression of the Apartheid Museum is one of admiration for the sheer scale and grace of its design. It has high and virtually windowless walls that sweep in dignified curves, with wide concrete ramps guiding you through the display halls.
The second impression is of the claustrophobic panic of being on the point of entering a well-designed prison and I suppose there is no accident in this, since imprisonment was the leading motif of life under apartheid.
You take your ticket (which randomly classifies you as white or non-white) and pass through the turnstile. You are now in a harsh concrete space adorned with blown-up copies of old-style identity documents, rows upon rows of them, intended to oppress (or impress) you with the sheer weight and detail of racial classification. Above your head are reproductions of the signs that made apartheid so stark and in-your-face: net blankes, net nie blankes, the municipal warnings that placed invisible walls round parks and public benches, round lavatories and entrances to railway stations.
We all remember how those signs looked even if it is only from photographs reproduced from Drum magazine and documentary films like Last Grave at Dimbaza. Here, however, the signs are brand new and have been unfaithfully reproduced in rather more attractive type fonts than the apartheid state could be bothered with. I have to wonder why the curators did not at least make an effort to procure examples of the real thing, in all their chipped, ugly glory. (They still sell them, at a price, in some of those murky antique shops on Long Street in Cape Town.)
Deeper into the body of the museum you start getting hit with the hard facts how the gold rush transformed the racial landscape of the place that came to be known as Gauteng, and the viciously petty minutiae of apartheid started falling into place.
A huge blow-up photograph of the full workforce of one of the mines covers an entire wall, allowing you to study the faces of the men who swarmed from all over South Africa and the world to come and seek their fortunes. Later on, an 1897 map shows how, at that early stage, these men and their families were segregated according to race: the mine workings to the south, the spacious white suburbs to the north, and, clinging to the outer edges, wherever there was room for them, the “Coolie Location”, the “Kafir Location”, and, just over the railway tracks, the “Native Location”. (How they separated “Kafirs” from “Natives” is a mystery.)
At this point the museum starts to get confused about whether it is about apartheid or about the history of Johannesburg, the white founders, the black resisters, and Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom. Only at certain critical and all too rare moments is the central issue pulled back into sharp focus. And for this, the work of the late, uncelebrated black photographer, Ernest Cole, is largely responsible.
Each of Cole’s startling black-and-white images carries the power of a carefully judged painting telling the whole truth, in all its bitterness, but invested with a certain spiritual beauty. Here, at last, we come to grips with what apartheid really meant the numbing, humdrum horror of a black person’s daily existence.
Naked mineworkers undergo a demeaning body inspection before being sent into the bowels of the earth. Men, women and children lie in filthy sheets at Baragwanath hospital, not knowing whether they will live or die, and not knowing if anyone cares. A Zionist preacher sings his heart out on a piece of open ground, desperately coaxing his flock to believe in a meaningful afterlife. Black housemaids kill time in their cramped servants’ quarters, cell-like rooms squashed high up on the roofs of luxury apartment complexes in the northern suburbs out of sight and out of mind.
The apartheid notices have come down, but black life is not much different from the images that strike at you out of Cole’s photographs. Life is better for the men on the mines, but the monstrous complex of Baragwanath, and the monstrous sprawl of Soweto that surrounds it, are still the same social and medical nightmare. Hopeless poverty and hopeless disease still walk hand-in-hand. Black maids and nannies still sit in hopeless contemplation in the same servants’ quarters up in the sky, or out back, near the drains and the dog kennels. On Sundays they still pray for pie in the sky.
So what is dead about apartheid? What can you really distil and put in a museum and say: “That was then: thank God it’s all over.”? Above all, how can a pair of white (OK, well, Jewish) twins who, by all accounts, made their pile of lucre out of selling highly toxic skin-lightening creams to black housemaids during the heyday of segregation and influx control, actually have the nerve to set themselves up as official curators of the legacy of apartheid?
It is not easy to corner Solly Krok with these kinds of questions. First of all, he denies the skin-lightening story. Second, he makes it clear that it is a complicated scenario anyway. It all began, in a sense, with gambling.
When official apartheid crumbled, the doors were opened to all sorts of sinful pursuits that had been proscribed under the old system. Gambling was one of them. So, when casino licences came up for tender under the new government of national liberation, the Kroks were in there like a shot. Business, after all, is business. And the Kroks, in spite of occasional setbacks, do good business.
Belatedly finding a bit of backbone in this moral retreat that would allow poor people to throw away their money into slot machines and on to poker tables, the government added a clause to the deal that obliged the successful bidders to “give something back to the community”.
What the Krok brothers decided to give back was not hard cash but a sense of history, built on the model of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Thus the idea of an Apartheid Museum was born.
And so, by several quirks of fate that could just as easily have been put down to a throw of the dice, the doors to our history will be clanging open this weekend.
It is a work in progress, says Solly Krok. The content itself should not be judged too harshly in these teething days.
But what was, or is, the true content of apartheid?
Maybe Solly Krok is right: the building is there it’s just up to someone to come along and fill in the gaps. And he is sure that the tourists will come flocking when the chemistry is right.
After all, they don’t fight shy of the Holocaust, do they? The morbid, living world is always guaranteed to find curious onlookers.