Red Location Apartheid Museum, South Africa

Award-winning Structure Recalls Dark Days of Apartheid

Oct 30, 2009 Chris Marais

The Red Location Museum outside Port Elizabeth in South Africa remembers the Apartheid years in a unique way.

The concept of a memory box is the central theme of the award-winning Red Location Museum outside Port Elizabeth, in the middle of one of South Africa’s oldest black townships

Working in the Gold-rich City of Johannesburg

One of the ways the hundreds of thousands of migrant mineworkers of southern Africa could be reminded of home was by way of a memory box. This smallish box – carried in the possessions of a worker far away from the fields of his youth – would contain a few simple objects to remind him of his dear ones. Sitting by night in the confines of a cramped hostel in the lee of a mine dump somewhere on the Witwatersrand Reef in the gold-rich city of Johannesburg, he would open the box, finger its contents and let his mind wander to a better place.

Red Location, Formerly an Anti-Apartheid Hotbed

Driving in from Port Elizabeth, one sees some of the old houses still standing, their rusty corrugated iron sheets salvaged from the Boer concentration camp in Uitenhage and the Imperial Yeomanry Hospital at De Aar town in the deep Karoo.

The township was established in 1903. As the years passed, the iron sheets of the buildings rusted and everyone began calling the settlement Red Location.

In terms of more recent anti-Apartheid struggle history, Red Location was a hotbed of activity from the Fifties through to SA’s first democratic elections in 1994. A number of the African National Congress (ANC – the current party in power) movement’s leaders came from this place or operated here.

Red Location Museum on Olof Palme Avenue

Many of the Red Location houses around the site of the museum have been removed, but those that remain still speak of poverty and day to day struggle for survival. The shacks were meant to remain there to remind people of past days of poverty, but those days are still painfully present and some dwellings are still in use. However, some of the former shack dwellers now live in apartment flats opposite the museum.

From the outside, the Red Location Museum looks like a new factory as it stands there on Olof Palme (late Swedish Prime Minister and anti-Apartheid activist) Avenue with its zig-zag roofs and metallic sheen. The fact that it was positioned in the middle of shackland, complete with wind-blown litter, skinny dogs basking in the sun and washing dancing like marionettes on lines everywhere makes it real and relevant. The museum’s presence and content will serve as an invaluable record of history in the long run.

Apartheid Years Revealed

The museum is a triumph of memory and history, working with the concept of a dozen huge, rusty memory boxes that contain traces of the ‘old SA’ and the freedom struggle the majority of its people experienced during that era. The memory boxes are designed as places of discovery, and the visitor is encouraged to walk from box to box, concept to concept.

There are exhibitions on crucial events during the Apartheid years, background to the trade unions, general living conditions in Red Location and information on medicinal plants used in southern Africa. Most chilling is a container with hundreds of files kept by the Apartheid police, and one ominous hanging noose dangling above the display.

Nelson Mandela

One particularly poignant old film documentary is on constant show, recording an Apartheid-era press visit to Robben Island to demonstrate to the world that prisoners on the island were being treated ‘humanely’. And although no one was allowed to speak to the island’s most famous inmate, Nelson Mandela, one photograph of his disgruntled, angry face is worth a thousand words.

Thumbs-up from the Royal Institute of British Architects

The Red Location Museum’s design was internationally recognized when its designers – Noero Wolff Architects – won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) inaugural Lubetkin Prize in mid-2006. Speaking about the building, the Lubetkin Prize judges said:

“It works as both metaphor and object: deliberately unglamorous, this is an architectural tour de force.

“This is the most evocative of locations and symbology for a museum of Apartheid and its struggles. To build a museum of the Apartheid era in the midst of the township that acted as a crucible for the struggle is an extraordinary achievement. The Red Location Museum brilliantly rises to the challenge, using architectural skill of the highest order to produce an unforgettable experience that is both viscerally and intellectually moving.”

Guided Tours to Red Location: Calabash Tours

t + 27 (0)41 585 6162

c + 27 (0)84 552 4414

f + 27 (0)41 585 0985

tours@calabashtours.co.za

The copyright of the article Red Location Apartheid Museum, South Africa in Sub-Sahara Africa Travel is owned by Chris Marais. Permission to republish Red Location Apartheid Museum, South Africa in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Red Location Museum, Port Elizabeth, South Africa	Struggle Graffiti on Display in the Museum.	Ongoing Poverty of Red Location.
Mockup of Apartheid Government Secret Files.	Visitors Touring the Red Location Museum.