Hector Pieterson Museum
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The Hector Pieterson Museum is a large
museum A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make thes ...
located in
Orlando West Orlando is a township in the urban area of Soweto, South Africa. The township was founded in 1931 and named after Edwin Orlando Leake, Mayor of Johannesburg from 1925 to 1926. It is divided in two main areas: Orlando West and Orlando East. Histor ...
,
Soweto Soweto () is a township of the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality in Gauteng, South Africa, bordering the city's mining belt in the south. Its name is an English syllabic abbreviation for ''South Western Townships''. Formerly a s ...
,
South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...
, two blocks away from where Hector Pieterson was shot and killed 16 June 1976. The museum is named in his honour, and covers the events of the anti-
Apartheid Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...
Soweto Uprising, where more than 170 protesting school children were killed. The museum features films, newspapers, personal accounts and photographs, the most famous being the iconic photo by
Sam Nzima Sam Nzima (8 August 1934 in Lillydale, Bushbuckridge Local Municipality – 12 May 2018 in Nelspruit) was an South African photographer who took what became the widely-circulated and influential image of Hector Pieterson for the Soweto upri ...
. The Hector Pieterson Museum became one of the first museums in Soweto when it opened on 16 June 2002. A companion museum nearby is Mandela House, the former home of Nelson Mandela and his family, which has been run as a museum since 1997. The total cost of the Hector Pieterson Museum project was
Rand The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is finan ...
23.2 million, which was covered by a 16 million rand donation by the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism and 7.2 million rand donation from the Johannesburg City Council.


Sources

* Museums in Johannesburg Apartheid museums Museums established in 2002 2002 establishments in South Africa Soweto {{SouthAfrica-museum-stub