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TThe Kliptown open air museum is where delegates to a people's parliament met in 1955 to adopt the Freedom Charter, now the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights and the South African Constitution. This historical museum in Soweto is dedicated to Walter Sisulu, a stalwart of the Freedom Struggle.
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NNelson Mandela had to watch the proceedings at Kliptown from a nearby rooftop.
TThe Kliptown Open Air Museum is a heritage site symbolising the right of people to freedom. This Soweto museum tells the story of the Freedom Charter.
AApartheid heaped indignity upon people of colour. This was fertile ground for the ANC Youth League, which appealed in particular to the hundreds of thousands of educated urban black youths. To counter white repression it advocated a passive resistance. As the campaign escalated, so repressive measures intensified.
To give the ANC a clear vision, its Cape leader, Professor ZK Matthews, proposed a national convention of progressive movements from all sectors of South Africa ‘to draw up a Freedom Charter for a democratic South Africa of the future'. The response was thousands of delegates meeting on a dusty field in Kliptown on 25 and 26 June 1955.
KKliptown was chosen because it was a multiracial, freehold area originally intended as a buffer between adjoining Soweto and Johannesburg. Here ‘a people's parliament', the Congress of the People, adopted the Freedom Charter, which is now the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights and the South African Constitution.
By the advent of democracy in April 1994, Kliptown had become derelict. Due to the national significance of the area, an urban regeneration and business tourism project, known as The Greater Kliptown Regeneration Development, was initiated to transform the area.
The showpiece of this is the Kliptown Open Air Museum, also known as the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication, a historical museum in Soweto that incorporates informal traders, shops, art galleries and a hotel.
There are also convention and conferencing facilities, restaurants and exhibition spaces in the square.
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