JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – I saw her through the semi-tinted panel. She was wearing a pink blouse and blue jeans. She was standing in front of one of the television monitors.

I had passed that section already, but I didn’t remember what was on that screen. She raised her hands to just under her eyes, and wiped the corners of her nose to the tip of her cheekbones. Through the blur of my own tears, I peered, wondering, was she crying?

We were both in the Apartheid Museum at Gold Reef City, Johannesburg, South Africa. She white and I black.

I was at the base of my humanness and suddenly, urgently need to ask her why.

Why was she crying? Why had her people done what they had done to our people? Why was she there? Why was she crying? What reason could she have to cry? What else do white people feel about Apartheid than sorry?

I hurried back to where she was. The tinted panel removed, I saw that she was not wearing a pink blouse nor was she crying. Her blouse was yellow and her face pale. Not pink or red, but pale.

And I lost my courage, sank back into my pointless emotions and went to the screen where she was standing. Former South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was explaining how good a system Apartheid was.

Why would or should she cry over that? I had never felt that racist in my entire life. And being the eternal humanist, had chastised those who voiced racist sentiments.

But how could an inherently narrow, selfish, black human being not feel racist in the middle of what was not a movie on Apartheid, but actual, extensive documentation of the suffering of non-white South Africans between 1948 and 1994?

The Apartheid Museum is, in a word, vast. It documents the rise and fall of the regime and seems to leave nothing out.

There are 120 hanging nooses, for example, demonstrating the number of political prisoners who were hanged, and a cage filled with guns that the security police used to terrorise citizens.

The admission tickets are designed like signs, denoting places where people of different races could go during Apartheid or separate entrances for each racial grouping.

Apartheid also segregated Indians and coloureds along colour lines, but the main divide was between black and white.

A deep, strange anger rose inside me when mothers told how they had to buy back their lands from white people and build less-than-comfortable houses for their children; and when I saw how police beat, tear-gassed and shot dead black South Africans.

I was filled with pride when I watched and read of the struggles of the activists, the demonstrations by scores of people. “Popular protest”, one clip said, was what had brought Apartheid down.

As I continued on my emotional roller coaster, sadness overcame me when I read and watched clippings of the 1976 student uprising in Soweto, which claimed more than 200 student lives, the first of which was 13-year-old Hector Pieterson.

When I thought I could take no more of the museum, I’m not sure which, if any, of those emotions I felt.

I left, wishing, if only for one minute, there would be no white people in the world. No one to snicker when the black waitress helps you to learn an old South African song that miners sang; no one to relax in a restaurant only when he or she sees you with other white people; no one to be overly friendly lest this angry black person attacks her; no one to follow you around in a store because it must be that you are about to steal something.

South Africans say their children will make the new country, where colour won’t matter.

“My daughter has white friends, Chinese friends, they come to my house. She doesn’t know,” our 30-something chaperone, said at dinner that night.

What I felt after leaving that museum and the Hector Pietersen Museum, must only be a smidgen of what those who lived in South Africa during Apartheid now feel everyday.

The question I continue to ask myself is: Are we expected to heal and if so, how? And the answer is always the same in the words of the father of the nation himself, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela: “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”