Ngaire Blankenberg introduces them like old friends. Here is the young activist Musa Moolla, who wrote the bold graffiti that cried, "The People Shall Govern!" Here is Z. K. Matthews, the country's first black professor, who had the idea for the Congress of the People in 1955. And Ida Mtwana, who burst into the haunting chorus of God Bless Africa when the police rode in on horseback.
Ms. Blankenberg's pals are, in fact, life-size wire sculptures, conceived in a medium usually used here in crude art by street kids, and they will take centre stage in a new museum opening this week in the desperately poor and violent township of Kliptown.
The museum commemorates the 1955 Congress of the People, a two-day gathering of almost 10,000 people of all races from across the country. Delegates met in Kliptown, at the edge of Johannesburg -- the town was a legislative loophole where blacks and whites could mix -- and drafted a Freedom Charter, which laid out a vision of South Africa as a pluralist democracy. The document formed the basis of the constitution finally adopted 39 years later, after decades of struggle against apartheid.
The museum is part of an effort to rethink museums in South Africa, where during the apartheid era they were, in the words of Toronto museum expert Gail Dexter Lord, "in the service of a repressive state." Artifacts and documents were used to bolster the idea of white supremacy.
The postapartheid museums aim to preserve heritage sites in the middle of communities and still have people go on living in the spaces. Ms. Lord attributes the new thinking here to the country's experience with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, wherein thousands of South Africans told their stories and the country had collectively to agree on a version of history.
Ms. Blankenberg, 33, was born and raised in Winnipeg to South African parents who, because they were of different races, could not live together here. She moved back seven years ago and began working on the newly multiracial television.
Gradually, she found herself drawn to heritage projects such as Constitution Hill, where Johannesburg's Old Fort prison complex was turned into a museum and which is the site of the country's new Constitutional Court.
There, Ms. Blankenberg sought out former prisoners to tell their stories, and then involved them directly in building new exhibits, such as recreating in sculptures made of old prison blankets the instruments used to beat them. In Kliptown, the stories are told in pictures, contemporary journal entries and people's memories.
Tshepo Nkosi of the Johannesburg Development Authority, which funds the project, said this was part of an effort to "create a new museum language. We're harnessing the age-old traditions of oral history . . . allow[ing]the people who experienced those traumatic periods to be given voice," he said.
A year ago, when Ms. Blankenberg turned her attention to Kliptown, the site of the historic Congress was a trash-strewn dusty patch in the middle of a slum plagued by chronic unemployment, AIDS and extreme violence. The Johannesburg Development Authority built a huge brick square, with a community hall on one side and a hotel on the other. Ms. Blankenberg moved quickly to preserve a series of original shops on the edge -- Jada's Hardware became the start of the museum, while the optometrist's office next door became a café. The $1-million museum is the first phase in a project that Ms. Blankenberg christened the "open-air museum," which will eventually have sites throughout the township.
Local volunteers have collected oral histories from residents, for example, for use in a "Freedom Route" trail of billboards and murals by artists in the area that will recall Kliptown 50 years ago as a multiracial community. Key houses, such as the one where the then-fugitive, Nelson Mandela, was hidden, will be restored and opened up.
One challenge in designing exhibits was finding a way to make the black activists it featured seem real. "Political biographies and speeches, that's all there is -- there's nothing about who they were as people," Ms. Blankenberg said. "There's no memory, no photos, no documents, no stuff. They were the hardest people to recognize. For Indians and whites there is more memory and more stuff."
Blacks, though, had been arrested, gone into exile or, in some cases, been beaten so badly they lost their memories, so there was much less of a record. "We had to open the process -- tell us about these people so we can write them into history."
Standing in the middle of the square in Kliptown, Ms. Blankenberg acknowledges that it's a long way from Winnipeg, but the best possible place for a storyteller. "Here, the stories are so strong," she said, "they tell you about such fantastic, dramatic things that people are able to achieve."