Go to Cape Town for the Waterfront, for Table Mountain and for the wine country. Go to Johannesburg for ... well what, exactly? Among tourists, the debate is usually a one-sided affair: in Cape Town, we’ll relax with sunshine and chardonnay in one of the world’s great holiday destinations; in Johannesburg, we’ll probably get mugged.

If a first-time visitor asks me what to do in Johannesburg, apart from the giant shopping malls and a sprinkling of cinemas, galleries and theatres, what can I say? Twenty years ago, maybe not very much. But now, the city has a simple selling point – the apartheid heritage industry.

Just as you take a gondola in Venice or see the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, so no visit to Johannesburg is complete without delving into South Africa’s recent and raw history of racial segregation.

The city has made the pragmatic choice to convert the source of its historic shame into a pillar of historical tourism.

Many start at the self-explanatorily entitled Apartheid Museum. Its construction was funded by Solly and Abe Krok, Jewish industrialists who were inspired by a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Unfortunately, despite their role in chronicling racial prejudice, the Krok twins built their fortune in part on selling skin- lightening cream to black women.

But the museum itself is very well done. Visitors are given a random card determining whether they are classified as black or white; they then enter a “whites only” or “non-whites only” entrance. It feels like a 21st-century museum, with a generous mix of text, photography, video and artefacts.

Cape Town has Robben Island, but Johannesburg has Constitution Hill, which is every bit as chilling. It includes the former women’s prison and Number Four jail, where black men were raped, forced to defecate in front of fellow prisoners at lunch and made to perform a bizarre naked dance before offering their rectums for inspection. It ends on an optimistic note with the Constitutional Court, an inspiring place but one that hammers home the chasm between ideals and where the country is really at.

And then there is Soweto. Today, there are township tours, which invariably stop at the Hector Pieterson memorial and museum, named after a boy killed in the 1976 uprising.

Nearby is Vilakazi Street, which has the tourist tug of being the world’s only street to house two Nobel peace prize- winners – Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

I have heard some in the tourism industry here wonder if there is a danger of overkill. But from what I have seen, it would be hard to claim that this has spilt over into undue commercial exploitation; it is not like my memory of the Berlin Wall being sold off in innumerable chunks.

Yet the historians, poets and film-makers certainly keep it coming. There is a new biography of Chris Hani, the charismatic struggle hero assassinated in 1993. Several movies about apartheid and its aftermath are out or on the way – most notably Invictus, with Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela.

And last weekend, I was at the Market Theatre for an event to celebrate Nostalgic Waves from Soweto: Poetic Memories of the June 16th Uprising, by Sol Rachilo.

A journalist recalled going with the parents of a boy who died that day to identify the body. She said: “We walked on top of small bodies in the mortuaries. It was traumatic.”

Everyone in the theatre was asked to recall what they were doing when they heard Chris Hani had been shot dead. Alf Khumalo, a veteran photojournalist who has just published a book, took a picture of Hani lying dead on his driveway.

Khumalo’s photographic eye could not help dwelling on the contrast between Hani’s crimson blood and the yellow, black and green of his African National Congress scarf.

Karabo Kgoleng, a young radio presenter, told the audience: “I speak to young South Africans now and you ask them: ‘Do you know who Chris Hani was?’ And some will know, but others won’t.

“It feels like a great part of our history is being lost, and because of that a great part of what we need to learn about how to take on our own struggles that we’re dealing with as young people; with crime, with violence, with the scourge of Aids, with drugs, with what’s happening with education.”

Perhaps the final paradox is that people rarely go for historical tourism in their own country. The apartheid museums and memorials will serve Brits, Americans and Japanese, but apparently not young South Africans.Who wants to be told they are standing on the shoulders of giants?

By David Smith.

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