The
Oprah South African Leadership Project provides cross-cultural
immersion and international exposure through travel
and study in South Africa for Morehouse College students.
In the future, it will involve an exchange of students
between Morehouse and South Africa, and will encompass
ethical leadership training and community service
in both Atlanta and South Africa.
May 19, 2005
 It’s
amazing how a decade can change the way people perceive
objects and ideas. Two green benches in the courtyard
of the Apartheid Museum tell the story of South Africa’s
struggle to come to terms with a past filled with
the successes of one race built on the backs of its
darker brothers and sisters.
The
benches are colored a simple shade of leafy green.
Over the green paint are two words stenciled in large,
white glaring letters: “Europeans Only.”
The paint, peeling from old age and probably the number
of people who are now able to sit on the benches during
their visit, regardless of skin color, look nothing
like the benches kept in pristine condition during
South Africa’s apartheid era. Like a carving
knife that grows dull from use, the benches have lost
their power to slice, but the sting of what they meant
still lingers with many of the Morehouse College and
Butler University members.
 One
person sits on a bench, smiling when the camera’s
flash opens. Another solemnly places himself on the
bench, slowly moving away from the words so that the
camera can capture everything. There are four exposures
taken--and not one smile.
“I
had a feeling of anger almost,” said Almamy
Sagna ’06, a business administration major from
Senegal in West Africa. “But as I matriculated
through the museum…that feeling of anger became
pride that black people had the strength to fight
and win against apartheid.”
A
sitting place meant for whites only—and transgression
could be a sentence of jail or death—is now
a place where people come to remember the past in
their own way. Some smile triumphantly at the long,
hard-won process of overcoming apartheid, while others’
mouths curve downward.
Signifiers
of segregation, such as separate entrances, a tattered
piece of paper used to identify the owner’s
race or intricately drawn paintings, have become historical
footnotes that give tourists pause. These things become
more than objects d’art, many of the students
discovered as they made their way through the exhibit,
but markers of a time and space when the lines of
demarcation between equal and unequal were more than
a separation of black and white: They were a way of
disqualifying the right to live in a free society
for persons of any color.
 Before
entering the museum, everyone is given a card. Some
people receive a card marked “white.”
Others are “non-white.” The card determines
how a person will enter the first part of the museum
tour. “Whites” walk through one entrance.
“Non-whites” through another. Many students
said they noticed that there was only one standard—white.
Everything else was
defined in relation to that.
Indeed,
it is a trait some of us still do, said Nashid Sharrief
‘06, a business management major from Detroit.
“We don’t define ourselves by who we are,
but who we are not,” he said after leaving the
museum.
During
the three hours spent walking through the museum,
it was easy to see that many of the blacks, Indians,
Asians and other minority populations in South Africa
had lived a life defined by being the “other.”
As
the group walked through different time periods in
South African history, it was evident why so few people
wanted to be black. Being black meant being excluded
from the political and economic decision-making process.
As European settlers aligned with one another, blacks
lives were largely devalued to nothing. The exhibit
showed how the prison system and forced labor added
to the ways in which the government kept blacks poor
and uneducated. For example, labor in the country’s
gold mines was supplied, in part, by prisoners. Miners
were paid the equivalent of 42 cents a day and worked
nine to 10 hours a day, six days a week.
 Ernest
Cole, a renowned black photographer, documented much
of black South African life under apartheid. In his
1968 book, House of Bondage, Cole writes: “Three-hundred
years of white supremacy in South Africa has placed
us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed
us of our self-esteem and surrounded us with hate.”
The
exhibit takes on a hopeful tone when it approaches
events of 1992, the year apartheid ended. Blacks could
vote, and leaders of the predominately black African
National Congress (ANC) governed the country.
But
our driver, Molefi Mataboge, a native South African
who was raised under apartheid, said that challenges
still remain.
“Despite
the fact that the country has changed, there’s
still a lot of anger,” explained Mataboge. “Those
who suffer the most are those who are trying to reach
out. And the scary thing is what will happen when
they get tired?”
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