As usual, after going through an experience, such as this visit, that was strong enough to cause a tectonic shift in my consciousness, I sought to find ways to bring the memories home for me to relive as much as I could. Typically, when we think of souvenirs, what generally comes to mind are the silly trinkets that fill every gift shop in every tourist trap around the world: refrigerator magnets, t-shirts, pencil holders and ashtrays emblazoned with names of locales from Buffalo to Bora Bora. But when you remember that the root of the word souvenir is the verb to remember in French you can see how sometimes a souvenir can be more than a bobble-headed hula girl for your dashboard. There are times for all of us when all we want is to look/ hold/breathe in our souvenir so as to take us back to an experience that rocked our world. It was *this* type of souvenir that I wanted to find at the Museum.

I drank in as much as the museum had to offer about South Africa's full history and the birth and death of apartheid. It was heavy and awesome, not in the hipster version of the word, but the true definition of inspiring awe. I knew that I had to have something to take home, some souvenir, that would immediately allow me to relive this experience whenever I needed to.

The gift shop did not have any gifts that fell under the category of "to relive this profound experience buy this." Instead there were posters, t-shirts, bookmarks, and bracelets; just the usual items with no major surprises. Of course, there were no bobble-headed hula girls for sale.

I opted to purchase a bracelet with the words, "respect, equality, freedom" encircling it, in addition to the logo of the Apartheid Museum. I also found a magnetic paper clip topped with a quote from Papa Mandela:

"To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others"

Boy did I love that! Yet what I found myself drawn to the most, and surprisingly so, were the mugs that had upon them some of the more hateful symbols of that past era. One mug in white read "Whites Only" in stark black text. The other in black with white text read, "Nonwhites Only." These were the apartheid versions of the Jim Crow signs from down South. They also mirrored the startling entry points to the museum itself.

You see, when you purchase your ticket to the museum, on the back of your entry ticket is your ethnic/racial designation for entrance. One entrance reads "Whites Only" and the other "Nonwhites Only." You are asked to enter the entrance that corresponds to your racial designation on your ticket.

Both entrances take you through a brief glimpse into the lives of those classified as white or nonwhite, depending on your door. There are old ID cards with designations listed as white, colored, or black. Also included are personal stories about how the classification was done and what effect it had on people's lives. What was both surprising and not so surprising was that the untrained people doing the classification were not geneticists or ethnologists, but mid-level bureaucrats imbued with the power to determine one's life caste simply by their visual assessment. Even those who were documented as being born to colored parents could be reclassified at the whim of these officials to black or Bantu, the lowest rung on the social ladder.

In my group of visitors to the museum, we were about evenly split between white and nonwhite. I could tell that many of my liberal white colleagues were a little uncomfortable about this in your face racial exercise lacking social nicety or the couching of the racial animus that we are more used to in present-day US society. Being asked to go through these entrances laid bare the dark and ugly that is a society divided by race.

To be clear, these entrances were a mere fraction of all that was contained in the museum. It was perhaps a 25 foot walk before both passages became one common atrium. Yet there was something quite deep and disturbing about having to enter in this manner. You never shook the sense of having been tapped on the shoulder by the ghosts of the most racist recent past. But this entrance also contrasted beautifully with the museum exit and walk through the Mandela "stick" garden. The journey made you infinitely aware of how far this country had come and how much they had triumphed.

In the gift shop I found myself reaching for those mugs as my souvenir, destined to create the combined sensations of repugnance and triumph that were the alpha and omega of my museum experience. This was the souvenir that I needed to take home. That was settled.

Back Home

The trip home left me jet-lagged and grungy. After scoring some make-up sleep, I set about unpacking the gifts and souvenirs from my long trip. I had found a gorgeous original print from a local artist that begged to be framed and hung in our family room. Of course there were also the requisite gifts for the kidlet and AdoringHusband. For the kidlet I had hoped to find a vuvuzela, the noisy symbol of the recently concluded World Cup. Unfortunately the Cape Town airport did not have one vuvuzela to its name. They had been all over Johannesburg, but I thought, why carry that thing through the airport bound to another city in South Africa? It would be simpler to buy it right before I returned to the States. Well that didn't work out so well...or maybe it did, considering how noisy those things are. Instead the kidlet got a drum (slightly more quiet) and some clothes (very quiet). AdoringHusband got a scarf with the colors of the South African flag and a few other goodies as well.