Culture & History
Understand where you are
Museums, heritage sites, San rock art, apartheid history, Cape Malay, Zulu and Xhosa culture. Context that makes the rest of the trip mean more.
Start here
The decisions that matter
District Six Museum
A small museum in a former church that tells the story of the 60,000 people forcibly removed from Cape Town's District Six under apartheid.
Iziko Slave Lodge
A museum in a 17th-century slave lodge on the Company's Garden — the city's slavery history and its long shadow.
Constitution Hill
A living court-and-prison precinct — the Old Fort, the Constitutional Court, and South Africa's constitutional story in one site.
Mandela House
Nelson Mandela's Soweto home on Vilakazi Street — the small house where the family lived before and after prison.
Voortrekker Monument
A massive granite monument to the 19th-century Voortrekker migration — controversial, imposing, and impossible to understand Afrikaner nationalism without.
Hector Pieterson Museum
A museum on the 1976 Soweto student uprising, named for the 13-year-old whose death became the uprising's image.
Mandela Capture Site
The spot where Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962 — now marked by a steel sculpture made of 50 columns that resolve into his face.
Liliesleaf
The Rivonia-era safe house where the ANC leadership was arrested in 1963 — now a museum of the underground struggle.
Freedom Park
A memorial precinct on Salvokop overlooking Pretoria — the country's official site of remembrance for the struggle.
Genadendal
The oldest Moravian mission village in Africa — a mission station of Cape Slave-heritage and the country's first teacher-training college.
Zeitz MOCAA
A contemporary African art museum in a carved-out silo at the V&A Waterfront — the biggest of its kind on the continent.
Anglo-Boer War Museum
A museum of the 1899–1902 South African War — the concentration camps, the commandos, and the central interior's defining conflict.
KwaMuhle Museum
A Durban museum of segregation and labour — housed in the building that ran the city's apartheid-era pass system.
!Khwa ttu
A San culture and heritage centre on the West Coast — run with San communities, telling San history from the inside.
Robben Island
The island prison where Nelson Mandela was held for 18 years — a ferry trip and a tour led by former political prisoners.
Phansi Museum
A museum of southern African craft and material culture in a Durban home — masks, beadwork, and the everyday art of the region.
National Museum
A natural-and-cultural-history museum in Bloemfontein — the Free State's oldest museum, with Bushman dioramas and palaeontology.
Planning South Africa? Steal our route.
Get our first-timer itinerary, field notes, and places worth making room for.