Where to celebrate the birth of democracy in South Africa.

1. Johannesburg, Gauteng

 

The appalling conditions that non-white South Africans endured and fought against for most of the 20th century and earlier are laid bare at Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum. On entry you will be handed a card stating your race, thus decreeing which of the allotted gates you go through. A combination of media immerses visitors in the nightmare world of apartheid, including a tiny chamber hung with 131 nooses, representing the 131 government opponents who were executed under anti-terrorism laws.

 

2. Soweto, Gauteng

 

Some of the fiercest of the anti-apartheid movement’s battles were fought in the Jo’burg townships collectively known as Soweto. The former homes of both Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mandela – now the Mandela House Museum – are here, as well as the memorial and museum dedicated to Hector Pieterson,  who died in the tragic Soweto uprising of 1976. The Regina Mundi Church, the largest Roman Catholic Church in South Africa, was an important meeting point during the struggle against apartheid and was also used for hearings by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the mid-1990s. Walter Sisulu Square in Kliptown commemorates where the Freedom Charter was officially adopted on 26 June 1955.

3. Pretoria, Gauteng

The Union Buildings in the country’s administrative capital are home to the presidential offices. Mandela’s inauguration took place here in 1994 and in December last year a nine metre-tall bronze statue of  the ‘Father’ of our nation with outstretched arms was unveiled here a day after his funeral. In Freedom Park, you can see a 700m long ‘Wall of Names’ inscribed with the names of thousands of people who died during eight distinct conflicts in South Africa’s history.

4. Cape Town, Western Cape

Perhaps the most famous landmark in South Africa, Robben Island, just off the coast of Cape Town is the former prison island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years before his release. Tours of the prison are given by ex-inmates, who give visitors a first hand account of what it was like to be imprisoned off the coast of the Mother City. A visit to the incredible District Six Museum allows tourists to experience the once multiracial area of Cape Town that was reclassified as a white-only zone, which resulted in the forcible removal of over 60 000 inhabitants whose homes and lives were destroyed in the process. The emotionally moving exhibitions here, which include reconstructions of house interiors furnished with mementos, evoke a community shattered by apartheid that nevertheless refused to be ground into the dust.