History and Society in South Africa

Understanding Apartheid’s Legacy in Cape Town

What does it mean for a country to move beyond a system whose effects still shape everyday life?

Kaya’s local team takes students into Cape Town to explore why that question still matters. The city’s neighborhoods, patterns of movement, and unequal access to opportunity all reflect the lasting influence of colonialism and apartheid. To understand modern-day South Africa, students look beyond historical dates and examine how the past continues to shape where people live, how they work, and which opportunities they can access.

For students interested in history and culture, Cape Town provides a powerful setting for this exploration. From the ferry journey to Robben Island to conversations with community members, the experience brings political change into focus through personal stories and questions that remain relevant today.

Read the city differently

A city’s geography can reveal a great deal about its history.

During apartheid, racial classification determined where people could live. The government separated communities into designated areas and distributed infrastructure and resources unequally. Although the laws enforcing this system have ended, Cape Town’s urban landscape still reflects the divisions they created.

Students explore this history through guided walks and museum visits. Places such as Bo-Kaap, the Iziko Slave Lodge, and District Six introduce different perspectives on the city’s past, from cultural identity and slavery to the forced displacement that reshaped entire communities.

At the Bo-Kaap Museum, students explore Islamic heritage and its place within Cape Town’s wider social and political history. A visit to the Slave Lodge takes them further into the history of slavery and its role in shaping the city’s development.

Walking between these locations encourages students to look at the city through questions of power, belonging, and exclusion. Who lives close to employment opportunities? Who faces long daily commutes? How does someone’s location influence their access to education and essential services?

By asking these questions, students connect the Cape Town they experience today with the policies and decisions that helped shape it.

When a neighborhood is erased

District Six brings these questions into sharp focus.

Under apartheid, the government declared this diverse neighborhood a white-only area. Authorities forcibly removed its residents and demolished much of the neighborhood, scattering a community that had developed over generations.

At the District Six Museum, students encounter this history through the voices and experiences of the people who lived it. Photographs, personal belongings, and oral histories preserve memories of the community, while the museum’s work connects those stories with ongoing conversations about restitution and social justice.

A guided visit and historical walk bring the history closer to home. Students consider what happens to a sense of belonging when a community is scattered. How do families maintain their connections to a place they can no longer call home? What can someone’s personal memories reveal that official records might overlook?

Here, culture becomes central to understanding apartheid. Students move beyond policies and institutions to explore the lives those policies disrupted, the relationships communities worked to preserve, and the stories people continue to reclaim.

Encounter resistance where it happened

Robben Island introduces another important dimension of South Africa’s history: political imprisonment and resistance.

The island held political prisoners from several liberation organizations. Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison there, making Robben Island an important place to explore both individual experiences and the wider struggle against apartheid.

Students travel to the island by ferry before joining a guided tour of its layered history and former prison facilities. Firsthand accounts add another perspective to the experience. Robben Island Museum’s interpretive material, for example, includes testimony from former political prisoner Vusumsi Mcongo.

Walking through a former prison changes the questions students ask. How should a place like this tell its history? What can a physical space reveal that a textbook cannot? How can personal testimony deepen, or even complicate, someone’s understanding of the past?

Time for reflection allows students to consider resistance as more than an abstract historical idea. They explore the experiences of people who challenged the system and continued to imagine a different future while living under extraordinary constraints.

Ubuntu: learning through connection

Kaya’s unique Ubuntu experience offers another way to explore South Africa’s history and culture, placing relationships and community at the center of the learning experience.

The program introduces students to Ubuntu through the idea that “I am what I am because of who we all are.” This provides a starting point for exploring belonging, collective responsibility, and wellbeing.

During this full-day immersion, students learn elements of Xhosa language and traditional rituals, meet residents from Khayelitsha and Nyanga, and take part in an interactive drumming and singing session with community members from Langa.

A conversation with a traditional healer introduces students to approaches to wellbeing that draw on spiritual, cultural, and psychosocial knowledge. Participants have the opportunity to ask questions about how these practices relate to identity, life transitions, trauma, and the search for meaning.

A shared meal creates further opportunities for conversation. Rather than simply hearing about communities, students spend time with people, listening to their experiences, perspectives, and priorities.

These encounters do not attempt to provide one definitive account of township life or apartheid’s legacy. Instead, they encourage students to recognize the diversity of individual experiences and reflect on the perspectives they bring to each conversation.

A place to connect history with the present

Cape Town brings history into focus through the connections between a law and a landscape, a family memory and a national story, and a democratic milestone and an ongoing process of change.

Students move between museum exhibitions, historic sites, community conversations, and the work of local organizations. Each encounter adds another perspective and gives them something new to consider during faculty-led discussions.

A question about apartheid might lead students to think differently about housing, identity, education, and belonging. That is what makes Cape Town such a compelling setting for this focus area: the past does not stay confined to a history book. It continues to shape conversations about the present and what comes next.