Around Johannesburg

We’re finally starting our Southern African journey (after two overnight flights) with our good friends, Nance and Sande, and their friend, Dottie. Upon arrival in Johannesburg mid-morning, we had enough energy to check out a small anthropology/archaeology museum at the Wit University.

For our second day in Johannesburg, we arranged a day tour around Johannesburg to learn about the legacy of Nelson Mandela. A lot was packed into this day.

A tour of Constitutional Hill showed us the site of the prison where both Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi were incarcerated (at different times) for human rights activism. The prison has mostly been dismantled now, leaving a few remains as reminders of the atrocities visited upon the prisoners—beginning long before, but becoming especially dire under the apartheid regime, from the late 1940s until the early 1990s. Once South Africa became a democracy, the Constitutional Court was built on the site—a beautiful building with lots of symbolism built into it. Notably, the concept of justice “under the trees,” meaning full transparency of the legal process (e.g., the carpet resembles the dappled shade of trees overhead).

Another highlight was a visit to the Apartheid Museum. They had an extensive chronology of Nelson Mandela’s life and a special exhibition on Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who recently died in December 2021.

We also drove by the stadium built for the 2010 soccer World Cup. Again, symbolism abounds— its design is inspired by the African pot, or 'calabash', with terracotta cladding representing fire underneath the pot and a roofline that resembles the bubbling foam on top of a stew.Read more