Constitution Hill

Today I went with Solomon (a faculty member of Wits in the Social Work Dept. who immigrated from Eritrea) to look at Constitution Hill. This hill is a public testament to post-apartheid South Africa: on one side it has turned the old segregated prisons into museums- focusing on how under apartheid the blacks and whites were not equal under the law and the brutal conditions for black prisoners; on the other side is the Constitutional Court- the highest court in the land that upholds South Africa's post-apartheid constitution where a person's color does not matter before the law. The second photo is the inside of the constitutional court where the Justices preside (they call them "Justices" and not "judges"). Click here for a 1 minute MP3 of my tour guide's explanation of the South Africa Flag. The next 2 photos are quotes from Nelson Mandela, who began his many-year political imprisonment at this place. The wall photo is from "Number 4", the jail that was for black prisoners. Amazingly, even Ghandi spent time at these jails- he had initially come to South Africa to serve as a stretcher bearer during the Boer War (now called the "South African War" to acknowledge the role that black South Africans played in it), and then afterwards as an advocate for Indians and proponent of peaceful resistance (Indians were also second-class citizens under the old government, and in jail the Indians stayed with the "coloreds", but they did not have it as bad as the blacks). The young chap with the smart mustachio, believe it or not, is the man who would become the Ghandi that we know in the US. Lastly is the cover of today's newspaper- getting rid of apartheid did not solve all of the society's problems, but it was clearly a huge step to fixing some of the most glaring.
People & terms:
-Nelson Mandela
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_mandela
-Apartheid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid
-Mahatma Ghandi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghandi