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SOWETO (South Africa) June 16: A museum honouring children slain by apartheid police in the 1976 Soweto uprising opened its doors on Sunday, exactly 26 years after a massacre which changed South African history.
The Hector Pieterson museum, a soberly stylish building of red brick and glass, records the revolt by school students against plans to teach them in Afrikaans, the main language of the white minority government. South African historians are revising the official version of their country’s tortured past, specifically for the 1948-94 period when the apartheid system of racial segregation treated non-whites as inferior beings.
“There are going to be many more monuments and buildings like this one, as we take stock and gradually rewrite our history,” Pumla Madiba, chief executive of the South African Heritage Resources Agency, said at Sunday’s opening.
This year, a privately owned Apartheid Museum was opened in Johannesburg to broad acclaim.
TRIBUTE TO “YOUNG LIONS”: The Hector Pieterson museum cost about 25 million rand ($2.40 million) to build and to fill with contemporary photographs, texts and documentary video. Exhibits include home-made weapons used by the students who took up arms against apartheid after the 1976 killings by police and soldiers.
“The opening of the...museum to the public is our acknowledgement of those young lions who stood, roared and fought for a better South Africa,” Environment and Tourism Minister Valli Moosa said on Sunday as the events of 1976 were commemorated throughout the land, as they are each year.
The rewriting of history began with the name of the museum in Orlando West, a suburb of the huge Soweto township south of Johannesburg. Hitherto, the surname of the boy who became the symbol of the uprising was spelt “Peterson”.—Reuters
