Travel to Johannesburg

Our Cape Town Leadership Program Session 1 Global Navigators have made it to Johannesburg!  With some of us traveling over 10,000 miles, we are thrilled to be together after our first full day in South Africa.  The 15-hour flight most of us endured from Newark went about as smoothly as one could hope (with various degrees of sleep quality).  Many of the group had a 6+ hour layover before our flight abroad and took some time to play cards and get to know one another before our adventure began.

Our first day in Johannesburg started with a brief orientation, and then a trip to Constitution Hills.  Constitution Hill is a living museum that tells the story of South Africa’s journey to democracy. The site is a former prison and military fort that bears testament to South Africa’s turbulent past and, today, is home to the country’s Constitutional Court, which endorses the rights of all citizens.

There is perhaps no other site of incarceration in South Africa that imprisoned the sheer number of world-renowned men and women as those held within the walls of the Old Fort, the Women's Jail and Number Four. Nelson Mandela. Mahatma Gandhi. Joe Slovo. Albertina Sisulu. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Fatima Meer. They all served time here. But the precinct also confined tens of thousands of ordinary people during its 100-year history: men and women of all races, creeds, ages and political agendas; the indigenous and the immigrant; the everyman and the elite. In this way, the history of every South African lives here.

Constitution Hill is also a place of contrasts: of injustice and justice, of oppression and liberation. The precinct is testament to the importance of preserving sites of atrocity for posterity, and also to recreating them so that they can serve the purposes of the present and serve to mold the future.

Today, we venture out to the Township of Soweto to learn more about the local people and culture that help define this great nation.