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| Meg, Trista, Emily, Maria, Megan & Becca enjoying time in Jo'burg |
I’m not going to go through every
single detail of our time in Johannesburg because other people have covered
that. Honestly, I wasn’t initially very excited to go. I felt like I was just
getting into a routine in Cape Town and the thought of going through another
week of traveling around with our entire group seemed cumbersome and
tiring. Once I got there, I realized that this break in my routine
to explore South Africa’s history more deeply and more experientially was
exactly what I needed to truly analyze the impact that my time in South Africa
has had on me thus far. Now that I have gotten to know my peer educators a
little better, I feel more comfortable delving into more intimate
conversations.
I think that my favorite experience
was the Hector Pieterson Museum and it’s focus on youth engagement and the
power that young people and students have in social movements. I know that my
peer educators and I have frequently discussed our frustrations with the lack
of political action among our peers, it’s cause, and how to effectively address
that. While I still don’t necessarily know the answer to that, it was so
empowering to see what people my age are capable of in the right context and
with the right mindset.
I don’t know if it’s right to say
that I enjoyed Sharpeville so much as it was the most profound experience I
had. To give some context: The Sharpeville Massacre occurred in 1960 on the 21stof
March (now the South African national holiday Human Rights Day) when around
7,000 black demonstrators stood outside the South African Police station to
protest the Pass Laws, the policy of internal passports required of blacks
during apartheid to systematically segregate the population, manage
urbanization, and allocate migrant labor by limiting their ability to move
within their own country. During this protest, police opened fire into the
crowd, effectively killing 69 non-violent protestors. Our time in Sharpeville
was spent walking through the police station where the protests took place and
touring Sharpeville. We ended at the Sharpeville Cemetery. The most salient
moment from this were two gravestones next to each other covering the graves of
two victims of massacre of kids aged twenty and seventeen—the ages of me and my
sister respectively. This was shocking first because of the state of the
cemetery. Despite its status as a national artifact, it was falling apart. It
was just so disconcerting to see such an important moment in South Africa’s
history represented in such an unimportant way. The fact that these two graves
existed there and I could relate to them in a really weird way almost seemed to
personalize the travesty of apartheid and its implications. I don’t exactly
know how to verbalize how I felt, but it reminded me of a quote from a book I
just read (Diane Brown’s The Sabi) by a classified colored woman who grew
up during the 20th century apartheid regime, “In the end you have to
surrender the individual to the magnanimous, and disregard the individual
wants, whims and idiosyncrasies. This must be the point at which freedom is
almost palatable”.
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