South Africa Guide
Gauteng
The Correctional Services Museum
Address: Mon– Fri 9am–3pm
Price: Free
Address: On the R101 toward Johannesburg
The chilling Correctional Services Museum at Pretoria Central Prison is well worth a visit. Make for Potgieter Street, which runs north– south three blocks west of Church Square, and stay on it while it becomes the R101 to Johannesburg. You'll see the notorious prison, where many famous political prisoners were held (and many executed), on your right. Be prepared to walk past depressed-looking visiting relatives on your way in. Inside the museum you can see artworks made by prisoners, including a life-size statue of an inmate crawling towards an expressionless prison warder, who has his arms outstretched, ready to correct him. There are also exhibits of knives concealed in Bibles and shoes, files in cakes and so forth. Most alarming by far are the group photos of various forbidding-looking prison warders through the ages, which seem a strange sort of propaganda for the prison service.