Africa Is a Country

Apartheid is a Museum

Apartheid is a Museum

By
Sean Jacobs

I’ve been to the Apartheid Museum, just north of Soweto and south of Johannesburg’s downtown. (See the picture on this blog’s About page.)  The museum, built next to a casino, has many problems, but today is not the day to raise them. That’s for another time.

A big issue for the museum is that it is struggling “to attract South Africans and particularly younger South Africans.”

So they employed advertising firm, TBWAHuntLascaris, to devise a campaign to get attendance up. The advertising people decided to do an experiment. They took to the streets (it looks like more like the campus of Wits University?) to ask young people directly what they knew about South Africa. They either asked them a series of questions or showed them photographs. “We simply asked them to identify a series of famous people. First popular culture icons and lastly a famous anti-apartheid leader.” The result, as you can get a sense from the videos below, “… Over 86% of the people interviewed easily recognised the popular figures and failed to identify the South African anti-apartheid leader.”  I was less surprise that the young people in the videos could not could identify Albert Luthuli, the first South African to win a Nobel Prize. What was more disturbing when one of them thought Joe Slovo, leader of the ANC’s armed wing, Communist leader and later the first Housing Minister in a democratic government, was Hendrik Verwoerd, Apartheid prime minister during the 1960s until he was murdered by a coloured parliamentary worker.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lfFkTp6h6Q&w=480&h=295]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG7wAwJHSQU&w=480&h=295]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjjxadhhV5s&w=480&h=295]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5MMDeTiLVM&w=480&h=295]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Tyf744rvI&w=480&h=295]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVETEPtahF8&w=480&h=295]

Further Reading

No one should be surprised we exist

The documentary film, ‘Rolé—Histórias dos Rolezinhos’ by Afro-Brazilian filmmaker Vladimir Seixas uses sharp commentary to expose social, political, and cultural inequalities within Brazilian society.

Kenya’s stalemate

A fundamental contest between two orders is taking place in Kenya. Will its progressives seize the moment to catalyze a vision for social, economic, and political change?

More than a building

The film ‘No Place But Here’ uses VR or 360 media to immerse a viewer inside a housing occupation in Cape Town. In the process, it wants to challenge gentrification and the capitalist logic of home ownership.