David Smith travels through the country's museums and discovers a nation struggling to come to terms with its past

South Africa's forgotten history

David Smith, Africa correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 2 May 2010 17.55 BST

The Big Hole, Kimberley, South Africa. Photograph: Bleyer/Friedrichsmeier Archive/Alamy

South Africa is fighting a battle to remember the past without becoming its prisoner.

Last week I took that seemingly old-fashioned mode of transport, the train. This was the Shosholoza Meyl [ʃʊʃʊˈlʊzǝ mǝɪł] Premier Classe and made me excited about railways for the first time since I was a boy. I sat on a sofa bed in a private compartment with air conditioning, coat hooks, dressing gown, mirror, table and power socket. There were dining cars with white cloths, silver cutlery and wine glasses.

Pushing up a steel window shutter, I saw the urban grime of Johannesburg's Park Station, the aspirational apartments of Newtown and metro stations such as Braamfontein, where black people waited for commuter trains that contrast brutally with the gilded pampering of tourists.

We rolled on through suburbs and townships, past spaza shops and city streets, patches of green and distant slagheaps. There was a junkyard with a small mountain of rubbish, then a house painted pink and framed by the perfect arc of a rainbow. We left the city and were soon out in the veld, watching the long grass glow in the light before dusk.

It made me see South Africa through new eyes, and disembark at Kimberley's railway station feeling I'd travelled back in time.

I visited the De Beers mine that made Kimberley the world's biggest diamond producer and heralded the country's industrial revolution.

Digging stopped in 1914 and it's now a tourist attraction known as The Big Hole, where you can stand on a viewing platform above a crater 214 metres deep with a perimeter of 1.6km.

But what's more affecting is the old mining town that's preserved nearby, a combination of original and replica buildings from the era of the New Rush when thousands of prospectors flocked here with picks, shovels and desperation. It's vividly detailed and feels like a ghost town in the Wild West, or the theme park setting of Michael Crichton's film Westworld.

There's a saloon with swing doors, beer glasses on the tables, eerie mannequins behind the bar, sheet music on the piano and a soundtrack playing Knees Up Mother Brown and It's a Long Way to Tipperary.

There are pubs still serving, adorned with antique wood furniture, Victorian newspaper cuttings and framed photographs of sporting men with handlebar moustaches.

I wandered on into mining magnate Barney Barnato's Boxing Academy, where his handwritten letters, furniture and theatrical props survive. There were old banks and a church, a shop stacked with vintage typewriters and a funeral parlour with a variety of coffins. I went inside the doctor's and dentist's surgeries, brimming with instruments, medicine bottles and a glass case containing a human skull.

All of these places felt as if the occupants had just left and could come back at any moment. I peopled them in my mind, and the lifeblood of a century ago felt as immediate as yesterday. The past is touchable and imaginable; anyone can be Doctor Who with an act of will.

But not everyone has time, money or inclination. Later, in Pretoria, I found myself virtually alone at the huge granite Voortrekker [fuǝrˈtrekǝr] Monument and an accompanying museum that tells the story of the Afrikaners. It seeks to put apartheid in the context of the Anglo-Boer war and a desire to protect Afrikaner nationhood. There is more mention of the African National Congress's bombing campaign, and its civilian casualties, than you generally find in mainstream commentary now.

The National Cultural History Museum and the Transvaal Museum of Natural History were similarly deserted except for school parties. I found it particularly evocative to wander around the Kruger Museum, former home of president Paul Kruger, with only the furniture and phantoms for company.

Like the former homes of the Brontës and of Charles Darwin in Britain, the house bears the trace of those who lived there. On display are Mrs Kruger's sewing boxes, the couple's mahogany wardrobe and safe, enamel and porcelain kitchenware, Kruger's elaborate telephone, installed in 1891, and the table where he talked with Cecil John Rhodes, Henry Morton Stanley and Mark Twain.

There are meticulously curated documents and gifts from Kruger's tour of Europe, including a French cartoon that portrays him as a bull charging the British lion. In the back garden there's his state railway coach, which has all the ornate elegance of the first-class cabins on the Titanic, right down to the polished wood toilet.

Nearby is Kruger's "last message to his people" from exile in Switzerland in 1904. Part of it says: "Do not forget that grave warning that lies in the words, 'Divide and rule'; never let these words apply to the South African nation. Then our people and our language will endure and prosper."

White history and black history. That night, at the State theatre, I watched the opening performance of Kalushi: The Story of Solomon Mahlangu, a struggle martyr hanged by the apartheid regime in 1977 at the age of 23. It is said his final words were: "My blood will nourish the tree that will bear the fruits of freedom. Tell my people that I love them. They must continue the fight."

The show makes pointed reference to the recent banning of ANC revolutionary songs. The author and director, Aubrey Sekhabi, travelled the country to audition actors for the role of Mahlangu, but was shocked to find how few knew anything about him.

He wrote in a programme note: "It became immediately apparent to me how apathetic our youth, in particular, are to issues pertaining to our history, icons, heroes and legends. One youngster even confessed to having only Googled him the night before, while another answered with remarkable confidence that he knew who Solomon Mahlangu was: 'Yes, I know him! He sings gospel.'"

Memories compete for survival in the collective consciousness. This year the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's release and the 50th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre were remembered. Tuesday is Freedom Day, celebrating the first multiracial democratic election of 1994.

But Kgalema Motlanthe (English: [xaˈli:ma mʊˈtla:nteɪ], Tswana [ˈkxɑ.lɪ.mɑ mʊ.ˈtɬʼɑ.n.tʰɪ/]), the deputy president, remarked last week that he was astonished by the "deafening silence" around the imminent centenary of the Union of South Africa, the precursor to the modern republic. Some people don't believe it's their history, he noted, whereas others would prefer to forget it. Motlanthe argued that South Africans must own their history to move forward.

I thought back to Kruger's last message. In it, he said: "He who desires to build a future, dare not neglect the past. Seek, therefore, all that is good and beautiful in the past, build on it your ideal, and strive to realise that ideal for the future."

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