Mission Monday: A trip to the Apartheid Museum

For our first “Mission Monday,” post, we’d like to share with you excerpts from the blog of our missioners in South Africa, Tim and Cecilia Marcy.

“We recently visited the internationally acclaimed Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Through photos, interactive displays, film clips, two longer films, and hundreds of actual items and displays with aural or written descriptions, the visitor is taken on a journey of understanding of what apartheid did to this country.

Photo by Erik Cleves Kristensen, flickr

The basic principle behind apartheid is simple — separate everything; cut a clean line through a nation to divide black from white and keep them divided.

To help the visitor begin to understand what this entails, each person who purchases an admittance ticket is randomly assigned a color — black or white — and goes into the museum at the corresponding entrance where, for the first ten or fifteen minutes, he or she is cut off from those of the other color, and is exposed to different kinds and qualities of displays.

Photo by jasonwhat, flickr

After rejoining those of the other color, one learns about segregation, the history of myriad cultures, race classification, beginning of black consciousness, resistance and armed struggles, and peace negotiations.

It’s a journey of tyranny and freedom, of tragedy and heroism, of chaos and peace. We had planned to spend a few hours, and ended up staying the entire day, leaving with a feeling of hope for the future.”

To read the rest of Tim’s post, including the six causes he thinks are behind Africa’s lack of development, visit the Marcy’s blog.

For reflection: When I have seen such division or struggle in my own community? How can I become a channel of peace?

Compiled by: Bridget Higginbotham