Soweto and the Apartheid Museum

Soweto began as the South Western Townships, where black Johannesburg was sent to live, and it has grown into a city of its own: matchbox houses and big new ones in Diepkloof, churches, schools, minibus taxis and braai smoke on a Saturday. The history on this tour happened in these streets, and Soweto tells it itself.

In 1955 a congress of thousands met in the open air at Kliptown and agreed the Freedom Charter, their written account of what a free South Africa should promise. The square is a memorial now, with the charter written out on it, starting with the clause everybody knows: the people shall govern.

Regina Mundi, a big Catholic church, held the meetings that could not be held anywhere else once political organisations were banned. When the police came inside it in 1976, they fired. The marks are still there, and so is the painting of a black Madonna and child above the congregation.

At the Hector Pieterson Museum, the morning of 16 June 1976 is walked through almost minute by minute: schoolchildren marching against being taught in Afrikaans, the police opening fire, and the photograph that went round the world, of a boy carried in the arms of an older student. The memorial is a couple of streets from where he fell.

Vilakazi Street is short and busy, and two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, lived on it. Mandela’s small brick house is a museum now. Then out past the stadium built to look like a calabash, where the 2010 World Cup final was played and where the country came to say goodbye to Mandela in 2013.

On the full day there is lunch in Soweto, then the Apartheid Museum on the southern edge of the city. Your ticket says white or non-white, at random, and you go in by the entrance it gives you. From there the museum walks you through the whole system and its end, and it needs time. Put Constitution Hill on another morning of the same stay.

Good to know

• Mandela House entry, and lunch on the full day, are extras. We confirm what is included in writing.
• The afternoon and the full day run on different days of the week. We fit them to your Johannesburg nights.
• Some of the material in both museums is hard to look at. Prepare older children for it.
• Soweto is people’s homes and streets. Ask before photographing anyone.
• Many short stops add up. Comfortable shoes and water.