Constitution Hill

Constitution Hill is very close to where I work - it used to be the site of the city's most notorious prisons for men and for women, and taxis will still take you to "Number Four" if you ask (the number of the men's prison there) while they probably won't know where the constitutional court is. Under apartheid (I'm told) if a black man disappeared his family would ask for him at the hospitals, the morgues, and Number Four - you could be arrested, among many other things, for being out five minutes after evening curfew. Conditions were... as you can imagine. Overcrowding was normal, physical punishment and abuse were rife, and solitary confinement in a tiny cell a metre wide by two metres long was common.... sometimes for up to a year.

After liberation in the early nineties these prisons were closed down and the new government decided to construct a building for the new Constitutional Court on the site. An international competition was run and was rather luckily won by SA architects, with a modern design which included African elements and lots of space and light - celebrating the transparency of the new order. Now you can visit the old prisons, which are a museum of racism and oppression, and you can also visit the Constitutional Court building and see "the best collection of South African art in the world" which decorates the walls, ceilings and spaces. Yesterday I was lucky enough to be in a group which had Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs as its guide to the building - I posted about Albie back in November. Albie was given overall supervision of the art in the building back in 1994 when he began his mandate - he's about to retire, as ConCourt judges only sit for a maximum of 15 years - and in that time he's dedicated a great deal of his free time to developing the collection. He obviously takes an enormous pride in the building, the art work, and its history - so much so that he's happy to spend part of his holidays (the court is still in recess) showing visitors around. The building is indeed very impressive, very attractive, and nothing like what you'd expect from any building used in a justice system; the juxtaposition with the old prison next door illustrates profoundly how much SA has changed - and Albie has I think every right to be proud of his achievement, as a judge, as an art collector, and as a survivor of the violence of the old regime .