This was an anti-racism and human rights project implemented in partnership with the British Council. Young people were taken on an intensive journey of exploration, discovery and development where they got to know each other as people and looked beyond notions of race. They also got to explore the influences of class, culture, gender and geography on identity. The project culminated with the young participants designing and implementing various community-based projects where they played the roles of being anti-racism and human rights ambassadors.

This was a partnership exchange project with Malmö Museums in Sweden. Young people from Sweden and South Africa were engaged in a series of exchanges across borders that investigated global issues of poverty, unfair trade, gender and sexuality, racism, human rights, health and welfare.

They produced collaborative exhibitions, research reports, had online conversations, produced a music CD and launched an e-newsletter. Some of the work took place in their respective local settings, but much of the work took place during a visit by ten youth travelling under the auspices of the District Six Museum, to Malmö in December 2006. Prior to this, In July of the same year, six youth from Malmö visited Cape Town and completed a joint exhibition and performance programme, expressing their perceptions of Cape Town as ‘insiders and outsiders’.

This exchange resulted in a second exchange, Peripheral Vision, a project that explored issues from the margins of cities like Cape Town and Stockholm. Youth produced a photography booklet, a poetry and music CD as well as mini-exhibitions of their experiences.

In April 2011, Jabulile Newman, a seventeen year-old students from Abbots College in Cape Town, was selected by the District Six Museum to be part of a Nelson Mandela Museum youth delegation travelling to Germany. She had been part of one the Heritage Ambassador  Proramme’s 2008/9 project titled Slavery then and now.

This is an extract from her experience at the Bergen- Belsen Concentration Camp memorial:

“We went to the main memorial and exhibition. This is situated where the Bergen Belsen concentration camp was and had a short introduction by one of the managers of the museum. He told us a bit about the camp and that it was the only concentration camp that had been three different concentration camps at different times. First it was the concentration camp for people of the war, and it mostly held men. Next it was a Nazi concentration camp which had many different groups of people of all ages. There were Jews, Polish, Sintis and Romas (gypsies) and many others. Lastly, Bergen Belsen was a concentration camp for people displaced after the war. In the museum there is an exhibition for each of the concentration camps which makes it a very large, informative and amazing museum where one could spend hours, getting lost in each unique story. The whole design of the museum has to do with remembering the concentration camp prisoners. Every little corner, picture or design was thought-through and has something to do with remembrance. There are TV screens all over with personal interviews with eyewitnesses telling their own personal stories.. Then there were different sections for the different concentration camps, all with lit-up displays of pictures, documents and other remnants of the incredibly hard and sad times in the concentration camps.”

Visit: https://bergen-belsen.stiftung-ng.de

The Nelson Mandela Museum was established as a Legacy Project on the 11 February 2000. This date also marks the declaration of District Six as a White Group Area in 1966. Both the Nelson Mandela and the District Six Museums aim to be platforms for critical debate, lifelong learning and the sharing of heritage resources linked to Nelson Mandela and the memory of all South Africans disadvantaged by Apartheid, through presenting various programs. 

For four years youth and facilitators involved in programmes with the District Six Museum have been fortunate to participate in this very important youth heritage leadership camp run by the leadership institute, at the Nelson Mandela Museum Youth and Heritage Centre in Qunu, Eastern Cape. Each camp was focused on a particular objective and was also aimed at achieving focused results.