Last weekend, we traveled to Johannesburg as our Bing Cultural
Excursion and visited the South African Constitutional Court,
among other sites of memory. Our Johannesburg visit made me feel
surprisingly heavy – I’d thought I’d been fortified by what we’d
already seen in Cape Town the prior five weeks. Walking through
the Women’s Jail and Building Number 4 was an experience like no
other I’ve had. While I understand American mass incarceration
as our greatest current civil rights issue, the history of
political imprisonment and mistreatment in South Africa was a
phenomenon completely new to me. It was remarkable to me that a
country could memorialize and reincorporate its oppressive past
by building the foundation of its Constitutional Court and
Constitutional Hall upon the bricks and walls of its old
prisons. Even though the Constitutional Court is the equivalent
of the United States Supreme Court, its design and presentation
could not be more different than our hallowed American building
of marble and loomin