— Stop 1 —

USA

Today, I’d like to share a great experience I had while traveling to South Africa for the NEA Foundation’s Global Learning Fellowship, in partnership with GEEO. The NEA Foundation is a nonprofit organization that supports public school educators by providing grants, professional learning opportunities, and programs that help teachers grow as leaders and improve student learning.

The Global Learning Fellowship helps teachers develop a global perspective by exploring important global issues, collaborating with other teachers from across the United States, and participating in an international study visit to see how people in other countries address educational challenges. South Africa was an excellent location for this trip, because it has been shaped by diverse cultures, a history of social change, and innovative approaches to education and community development.

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Africa

South Africa is, unsurprisingly, located at the very southern tip of the continent of Africa. Africa is the second-largest continent on Earth (only Asia is bigger), and it is much larger than most maps make it look. In fact, Africa is so enormous that you could fit the United States, China, India, Japan, and much of Europe inside its borders—all at the same time—and still have room to spare.

Why do so many people picture Africa as smaller than it really is? It comes down to maps. The most common world map, called the Mercator projection, was designed centuries ago to help sailors navigate. To do that, it stretches the areas near the top and bottom of the map (like Europe, Greenland, and Canada) and shrinks the areas near the middle (like Africa). The result is a map that’s useful for sailing but very misleading about size.

Africa is also the most diverse continent on Earth in one important way: its people speak more than 2,000 different languages. It is home to 54 countries—more than any other continent—and to the oldest evidence of human beings anywhere on the planet. In fact, scientists digging in the caves of southern Africa have uncovered fossils of ancient human relatives—called hominins—that are millions of years old. (Hominins are the group that includes modern humans along with our extinct ancestors and close relatives, but not other apes like chimpanzees.) Discoveries like these are why scientists say that, no matter where our families come from today, the human story ultimately began in Africa.

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South Africa

At the very southern tip of Africa, South Africa is located where two oceans—the Atlantic and the Indian—meet. It’s a big country, about twice the size of Texas, and it’s famous for its incredible variety of landscapes: snow-capped mountains, deserts, grasslands full of wildlife, and thousands of miles of coastline.

South Africa is sometimes called the “Rainbow Nation,” a nickname made famous by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The name celebrates the country’s remarkable mix of cultures, languages, and peoples. In fact, South Africa has 12 official languages—more than almost any country in the world—including Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, and English. South African Sign Language became the twelfth official language in 2023. (Can you imagine your school announcements being read in eleven languages?)

South Africa is also unusual because it has three capital cities instead of one. Each branch of the government sits in a different city: Pretoria (where the president works), Cape Town (where the laws are made), and Bloemfontein (the home of the highest courts). This unusual arrangement was a compromise created when the country was first unified in 1910.

To understand South Africa today, you need to know about a difficult chapter in its history called apartheid. Apartheid was a system of laws, in place from 1948 to the early 1990s, that separated people by the color of their skin and treated them unequally. The word “apartheid” comes from the Afrikaans language and means “apartness” or “separateness.” Under apartheid, a small white minority held power, while the large Black majority and other groups were denied the right to vote, forced to live in separate areas, and blocked from many jobs, schools, and public places. Today, we’ll learn about how South Africans lived through apartheid, and how, remarkably, they overcame it without a civil war.

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Cape Town

Do you remember which part of the government resides in Cape Town? It is the legislature, the branch that makes laws.

Cape Town is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It sits on the coast and is wrapped around a harbor. About five million people live in the greater Cape Town area.

Cape Town is the oldest city in South Africa and is nicknamed the “Mother City.” It was founded in 1652, when the Dutch East India Company—a powerful European trading company—set up a supply station here. Ships sailing the long, dangerous route between Europe and Asia needed a place to stop for fresh food and water, and Cape Town’s location made it the perfect halfway point. Over the following centuries, the Cape passed from Dutch to British control, and European settlers, enslaved people brought from across the Indian Ocean, and the region’s Indigenous peoples all shaped the city that exists today.

Why was this sea route so important in the first place? Just south of Cape Town, the land narrows to a rocky point where the ocean can be fierce. In 1488, a Portuguese explorer named Bartolomeu Dias became the first European known to sail around the southern tip of Africa—proving that ships could reach Asia by sea instead of over long, expensive land routes. The waters there were so rough that Dias first called it the “Cape of Storms,” but it was later renamed the “Cape of Good Hope” to encourage nervous sailors to make the dangerous journey. That hopeful new name helped turn this stretch of coast into one of the busiest sea routes in the world—and eventually gave rise to the city of Cape Town.

One challenge Cape Town has faced recently is a water shortage. In 2018, after several years of severe drought, the city nearly became the first major city in the world to run out of water—a crisis residents referred to as “Day Zero.” Through strict conservation, Cape Town managed to avoid disaster, and its experience is now studied by cities everywhere as a warning about climate change and water shortages.

— Stop 5 —

Bo-Kaap

One of the first places we explored in Cape Town was Bo-Kaap, a neighborhood famous for its houses painted in every color you can imagine—bright pink, electric blue, sunshine yellow, lime green. It is one of the most photographed places in the city, but its colorful streets tell a deeper story.

Bo-Kaap is the historic home of the Cape Malay community. Their ancestors were brought to Cape Town by the Dutch beginning in the 1600s—many as enslaved people and political exiles from places like Indonesia, Malaysia, and other parts of the Indian Ocean world. Despite centuries of hardship under slavery, colonial rule, and later apartheid, this community held on to its identity, its Muslim faith, and its traditions. Bo-Kaap is home to the oldest mosque in South Africa, the Auwal Mosque, founded in 1794.

Why are the houses so brightly painted? There are a few stories. One popular explanation is that after apartheid ended and residents were finally allowed to own their homes, many people painted them in joyful colors to celebrate their freedom and self-expression. Whatever the exact origin, the colors today are a proud symbol of the community’s resilience.

— Stop 6 —

District Six Museum

Not far from Bo-Kaap, we visited a place that helps explain the human cost of apartheid: the District Six Museum. District Six was a lively, crowded neighborhood near the center of Cape Town where people of many backgrounds—Black South Africans, Cape Malays, immigrants, and others—lived side by side for generations. But in 1966, the apartheid government declared District Six a “whites-only” area. Over the following years, about 60,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to distant, bleak townships far outside the city. Their houses were then bulldozed to the ground.

What does “forcibly removed” mean? It means the government forced people to leave their homes whether they wanted to or not—they had no choice. Families lost not just their houses but their neighbors, their schools, their places of worship, and their whole way of life.

Today, the District Six Museum stands as a place of memory. Former residents helped create it, filling it with old street signs, photographs, maps, and personal belongings. On the museum floor is a giant hand-painted map of the old neighborhood, where former residents have written the names of the streets and marked where their homes once stood. It is a powerful reminder that behind every big historical event are real people and real families.

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!Khwa ttu & the San

Just north of Cape Town, we visited the !Khwa ttu (pronunciation) Center, a place run by and for the San people. You might notice something unusual about that name—the exclamation point at the front. That symbol represents a “click,” a sound made with the tongue that is a real part of San and other southern African languages. These click sounds are among the oldest features of human language still spoken today.

The San are the Indigenous peoples of southern Africa, and they are among the oldest continuous cultures on Earth—their ancestors have lived in this region for tens of thousands of years. Traditionally, the San were expert hunters and gatherers with deep knowledge of the land, the animals, and the plants around them. They are also famous for creating some of the world’s oldest rock art, painted on cave and cliff walls across southern Africa.

Like many Indigenous peoples around the world, the San have faced enormous hardship. Over the centuries, they lost much of their traditional land, and today their languages and ways of life are under serious threat. Many San are now among the poorest and most marginalized people in southern Africa. The !Khwa ttu Center exists to help preserve San culture and languages, to teach young San people, and to let visitors learn about this remarkable heritage directly from San guides themselves.

— Stop 8 —

SEED & School Visits

We also visited an organization called SEED, a non-profit that teaches people of all ages about gardening, ecology, healthy food, and caring for the environment. At SEED, students learn to grow their own vegetables and understand where food comes from. It’s a wonderful example of what is called experiential learning—like using your hands in the soil rather than sitting at a desk.

Some of our most meaningful experiences we had in South Africa were not at famous landmarks but inside local schools. We visited several schools and got to meet teachers and students, sit in on lessons, and share ideas about teaching across cultures.

These visits showed us how South Africa is working to build a fair education system after apartheid. Under apartheid, schools were deliberately separated and unequal—the government spent far more on white children’s education than on Black children’s, a policy intentionally designed to limit opportunity for Black South Africans. Since apartheid ended, South Africa has worked hard to give every child access to a good education. Meeting South African teachers who are working to tackle that challenge was inspiring.

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Robben Island

A short boat ride from Cape Town’s harbor lies a small island with an enormous place in history: Robben Island. For centuries it was used as a place to send people the authorities wanted to keep away from society. But it is best known as the prison where Nelson Mandela was held for 18 of the 27 years he spent behind bars.

Who was Nelson Mandela? Mandela was the most famous leader of the struggle against apartheid. Because he fought against the unjust system—and at one point supported using force to do so—the apartheid government put him on trial and sentenced him to life in prison in 1964. He was locked in a tiny cell here on Robben Island, where he and the other prisoners were forced to do hard labor breaking rocks in a limestone quarry. Yet even in prison, Mandela became a symbol of hope and dignity for oppressed South Africans and millions of people around the world.

After 27 years, Mandela was finally released in 1990, as apartheid began to crumble. Rather than seeking revenge, he called for forgiveness and worked to unite the country. In 1994, in South Africa’s first election in which people of all races could vote, Nelson Mandela was elected the nation’s first Black president. He is often remembered in South Africa by his clan name, Madiba, a term of deep affection and respect.

Mandela was not the only leader to change the world through this kind of courage. Decades earlier, a young lawyer named Mahatma Gandhi spent more than twenty years living in South Africa, where he first developed his ideas about nonviolent resistance—standing up to unjust laws through peaceful protest rather than force. Gandhi later carried those methods home to India and helped win its independence. His example went on to inspire other leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement in the United States. It’s remarkable to think that a way of fighting injustice that shaped American history was partly born in South Africa.

Today, Robben Island is a museum and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Do you know what a UNESCO World Heritage Site is? It is a landmark or area designated by the United Nations for having cultural or historical significance. The program is intended to conserve sites for future generations.

Remarkably, many of the tour guides on Robben Island are former prisoners themselves, who share their own memories of life on the island. Standing in Mandela’s actual cell—small enough to touch both walls at the same time—is something our group will never forget.

— Stop 10 —

V&A Waterfront

Back on the mainland, we spent time at the V&A Waterfront, one of Cape Town’s busiest spots. The “V&A” stands for Victoria & Alfred, named after Britain’s Queen Victoria and her son Prince Alfred, who helped start construction of the harbor in the 1860s. It is built around a harbor that is still busy with boats today.

The Waterfront is now full of restaurants, shops, museums, and street performers. It’s also where visitors catch the ferry to Robben Island. One of its newest landmarks is the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, a museum of modern African art built inside a hollowed-out old grain silo.

— Stop 11 —

Table Mountain

Towering over Cape Town is one of the most famous natural landmarks on Earth: Table Mountain. Its most striking feature is its top—not a pointy peak, but a long, flat surface stretching nearly two miles, as level as a tabletop.

Table Mountain rises more than 3,500 feet above the city. On many days, a thin layer of clouds spills over the flat top and pours down the sides, and locals affectionately call this the “tablecloth.” You can hike to the top, but most visitors ride a rotating cable car that spins slowly as it climbs, giving everyone a 360-degree view.

The mountain is the centerpiece of Table Mountain National Park, and it is a global hotspot for biodiversity. Biodiversity means the variety of plants and animals living in a place. Table Mountain is covered in a special type of shrubland called fynbos (pronunciation), and it is home to more plant species than the some entire countries. Many of the plants are endemic, which means they grow nowhere else on the planet. In recognition of its natural wonders, Table Mountain is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is often listed as one of the “New 7 Wonders of Nature.”

— Stop 12 —

Johannesburg

From Cape Town, we flew about two hours northeast to Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city, with well over 5 million people. Locals call it “Joburg” or “Jozi” for short, and it has another nickname too: “the City of Gold.”

Johannesburg is one of the largest cities in the world not built on a river, lake, or coastline. So why is it here? The answer is buried underground. In 1886, prospectors discovered an enormous reef of gold beneath these hills—one of the richest gold deposits ever found on Earth. Almost overnight, the little mining camp exploded into a booming city as people rushed in from all over the world to seek their fortune. In the local Zulu and Sotho languages, the city is sometimes called eGoli or Gauteng—“the place of gold.”

That gold rush shaped everything about the city, including the darker parts of its history. Mining companies needed huge numbers of low-paid workers, and the system that developed to control and separate those workers helped lay the groundwork for apartheid. Johannesburg became the beating heart of both South Africa’s economy and, later, its struggle for freedom.

— Stop 13 —

Apartheid Museum

To understand modern South Africa, our group spent time at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. It tells the full story of apartheid—how it began, what life was like under it, and how South Africans finally overcame it.

The museum makes its point before you even go inside. When you buy your ticket, it randomly assigns you a category: “white” or “non-white.” You then must enter through one of two separate doors, marked for each group. It’s a small taste of a system in which the government sorted every single person by race and used that label to control where they could live, work, go to school, and travel.

Through films, photographs, and everyday objects, the museum shows both the cruelty of apartheid and the courage of the people who resisted it—from famous leaders like Nelson Mandela to countless ordinary citizens whose names we’ll never know. It doesn’t hide the painful parts of history, but it also celebrates one of the most remarkable achievements of the 20th century: a country dismantling such a system and choosing democracy.

— Stop 14 —

Soweto

One of the most meaningful stops on our journey was Soweto. The name is short for “South Western Townships.” Under apartheid, townships were areas on the edges of cities where the government forced Black South Africans to live, far from the white neighborhoods and often without proper services. Soweto grew into the largest and most famous township in the country, and today it’s a vibrant community of over a million people.

Soweto is celebrated as a birthplace of the struggle against apartheid, and it’s especially remembered for a heartbreaking but pivotal event: the Soweto Uprising of June 16, 1976. On that day, thousands of Black schoolchildren marched in peaceful protest. It was sparked by a new rule forcing them to be taught in Afrikaans, a language many saw as the language of their oppressors.

The students were protesting something much bigger than the language they were being taught in, however. They were rising up against the entire system of “Bantu Education”—a deliberately inferior education designed to keep Black children from advancing—and against apartheid itself.

The peaceful march turned tragic when police opened fire on the students. Among those killed was a young boy named Hector Pieterson, and a photograph of him being carried by another student spread around the world, highlighting the brutality of apartheid to people everywhere. The uprising marked a turning point, because it inspired new resistance at home and turned international opinion firmly against the apartheid government. Today, June 16 is a national holiday in South Africa called Youth Day, honoring the courage of those students.

— Stop 15 —

Vilakazi Street

While in Soweto, we walked down what may be the most extraordinary street in the world: Vilakazi Street. It holds a record found nowhere else on Earth—it is the only street where two Nobel Peace Prize winners have lived.

The first was Nelson Mandela, whose modest redbrick house is now a museum called the Mandela House. He lived here before his long imprisonment, and famously returned to it briefly after his release in 1990. The second was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a church leader who became one of the most powerful voices against apartheid. Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, and Mandela won it in 1993. It was Tutu who gave South Africa its hopeful nickname, the “Rainbow Nation.”

— Stop 16 —

Nelson Mandela Square

Our journey concluded at Nelson Mandela Square in Johannesburg, home to a giant 20-foot-tall bronze statue of Nelson Mandela.

Throughout our trip, one person’s legacy seemed to connect nearly every stop—from his prison cell on Robben Island, to his home on Vilakazi Street, to the museums we visited. Nelson Mandela passed away in 2013 at the age of 95, but he is still lovingly called the “Father of the Nation.” Ending our journey in this square, beneath his welcoming figure, felt like the perfect way to say goodbye to the country he helped transform.