The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg: Tickets, Opening Times and New Installations

The Apartheid Museum is acknowledged as the pre-eminent museum in the world that focuses on South Africa’s Apartheid era.

Visitors receive a comprehensive education on important South African history with exhibits that include provocative film footage, photographs, text panels and artefacts illustrating the events and human stories that are part of that horrific period of our history.

Revisit history at the Apartheid Museum

Having opened in 2001, the Apartheid Museum exhibits have been assembled and organised by a multi-disciplinary team of curators, filmmakers, historians and designers.

The Museum features permanent exhibitions that trace this history from its very beginnings to the post-democratic period. Every so often they also put together temporary exhibitions that delve a bit deeper into important figures or events from the Apartheid and post-Apartheid eras.

Temporary exhibitions at the Apartheid Museum

The Don Mattera Obituary Installation

The Apartheid Museum in partnership with the Don Mattera Legacy Foundation will unveil its Don Mattera Obituary Installation on Mandela Day.

Don Mattera was a towering figure in South African literature, journalism and cultural life, whose voice captured the pain and resilience of a nation under apartheid.

Born Donato Francisco Mattera in Johannesburg’s Western Native Township, he was affectionately named Bra Don, Zinga, and Monnapula – the man who came with the rain. Later as a Muslim, he was known as Muhammad Omaruddin.

Shaped by a lineage that reflected South Africa before apartheid, Mattera’s Afro-Italian roots – Khoi-Xhosa, Tswana and Neapolitan respectively – resisted simple definition. Apartheid sought to erase this complexity, reducing him to a racial category and a number. What it could not erase was memory and resistance.

And then there was Sophiatown, a legendary, multi-racial suburb in Johannesburg. Established in 1899, it became one of the few places where Black South Africans could legally own land, and was demolished by the apartheid government in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Growing up in Sophiatown, Mattera came of age amid music, debate, beauty and violence. After surviving gang life, prison and profound loss, words became his refuge. The destruction of Sophiatown marked a turning point, transforming personal grief into political awakening.

Influenced by Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness, Mattera believed culture was a weapon of liberation. As a poet, journalist, activist, husband and father, he used language as a form of resistance, chronicling the everyday lives of Black South Africans with lyricism, anger, and compassion.

His autobiography, Memory is the Weapon, remains a seminal account of life and loss under apartheid and the power of personal and collective memory.

Cost: Entrance to the Apartheid Museum is R240pp as of 2026. Book via Webtickets

When: Running from 18 July 2026 until December 2027. The museum is open Tuesdays to Sundays, 9am to 5pm
Where: Apartheid Museum, Northern Parkway, Gold Reef Rd, Ormonde, Johannesburg South

Mandela Exhibition

This exhibition traces how central Nelson Mandela has been to every stage of South Africa’s epic struggle against apartheid – from formulating a new approach in the 1940s to leading the mass struggles of the 1950s, the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe in the early 1960s, and his imprisonment for 27 years on Robben Island.

The exhibition is divided between the following themes:

Mandela’s character
Mandela’s early thoughts on comradery and who should lead the resistance
Mandela as a leader
Mandela as a prisoner
Mandela as a negotiator
Mandela as a statesman

Cost: Entrance to the Apartheid Museum is R240pp as of 2026. Book via Webtickets

When: The museum is open Tuesdays to Sundays, 9am to 5pm
Where: Apartheid Museum, Northern Parkway, Gold Reef Rd, Ormonde, Johannesburg South

Tutu Exhibition

The Tutu Exhibition traces the monumental contributions that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has made to a democratic South Africa.

He has taught us, admonished us, comforted us and led us in protest. When necessary, he stood in the line of fire, and when our anger turned inwards, he saved the lives of the innocent. He heard our confessions of guilt and inspired us to be better human beings.

The exhibition covers his legacy along with shedding light on how the churches became a powerful force in the struggle against apartheid and the quest for a better society.

The exhibition is divided between the following themes:

Apartheid education: The most evil act of all
The struggle in the church: Fighting a false gospel
Faith in action: The campaign for sanctions
Protest and peace-making: In the streets and stadiums
Unfinished business: Tutu, truth and reconciliation
Tutu legacy film

Cost: Entrance to the Apartheid Museum is R240pp as of 2026. Book via Webtickets

When: The museum is open Tuesdays to Sundays, 9am to 5pm
Where: Apartheid Museum, Northern Parkway, Gold Reef Rd, Ormonde, Johannesburg South

Apartheid Museum’s Permanent Exhibition

The Permanent Exhibition at the Apartheid Museum traces the journey of pain and strife in South Africa’s struggle for liberation. It is a trip through time that traces the country’s footsteps from dark days of bondage to a place of healing founded on the principles of a democracy.

The exhibition is divided between the following themes:

The Pillars of the Constitution
Race Classification
Journeys (illustrating the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of some of those who journeyed to the city of gold in the years following 1886 – the year gold was discovered in Johannesburg)
Segregation
Apartheid
The Turn to Violence (Sharpeville Massacre and The Rivonia Trial)
Life under Apartheid
The Homelands
The Rise of Black Consciousness
Political Executions
The Significance of 1976
Total Onslaught
Roots of Compromise
Mandela’s Release
On the Brink (the fallout from the unbanning of political organisations in 1990)
Negotiating a Settlement (the National Peace Accord and the path to the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA))
1994 Election
Mandela’s presidency
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
The New Constitution
A Place of Healing