I organized a private day tour from Johannesburg to visit eight of the fourteen sites on the final inscription that are in or around Johannesburg: (a) Liliesleaf, (b) Constitution Hill, (c) Orlando West, (d) Walter Sisulu Square, and (e-h) the four Sharpeville sites.  It would have been difficult to visit on my own, so I emailed several tour companies listed on TripAdvisor with the list of sites, and several responded that they’d be pleased to set up a tour. It ended up being a 9+ hour day and I could have taken longer in Orlando West and Liliesleaf, but overall I was pleased with the day and I feel like I have a good enough sense of the site to mark it as visited.

I am not always a fan of serial sites like this one, but I think the final inscription has a terrific mix of sites to commemorate Nelson Mandela and to teach visitors about the horrors of apartheid.

Here is more detail about the sites I visited: 

• Sharpeville was the site of a 1960 massacre of peaceful protestors.  It is a township over an hour (like 90 minutes in traffic) from downtown Johannesburg, and it is not often visited, particularly by international tourists. The tour company arranged a visit to the memorial (where the massacre occurred) and the police station, as well as some of the cemeteries.  Locals say that the number of deaths is much higher than the 61 officially reported.  The memorial has a small museum with pictures and tales of survivors who remember the massacre. It was the most powerful site and I would highly recommend a visit.
• Liliesleaf was a resistance site that police raided in 1963 and ten individuals that were present or implicated (including Nelson Mandela) were tried for treason as a result. Liliesleaf was perhaps my favorite visit of the day. It was a well maintained museum with a lot of information. I visited on a Saturday when it is typically closed, and the tour company was able to arrange a private tour where the museum was opened up for me. It is a good place to start to get oriented about Nelson Mandela and the resistance movement. Mandela lived on the property for some time, though he was already jailed at the time of the police raid.
• Orlando West was the site of a 1976 uprising where hundreds of high school students were killed.  It also has the homes of many notable figures from the resistance movement, including Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, and is an interesting area to tour more generally, although the listing is focused on the 1976 uprising and related sites. There is a memorial and museum dedicated to the uprising, named after Hector Peterson, a South African boy of only 12 who was shot in the uprising. Pieterson’s name became famous as one of the first victims of the uprising and also because of a famous photograph taken of another teenager carrying his body.
• Consititution Hill is the site of the former prison for black people in Johannesburg, dating long before apartheid. There are regularly scheduled tours, lasting about 40-50 minutes. The current Supreme Court is as built on part of the site, and the tours also include a visit to the fort. Mandela was imprisoned here for a time (fun fact, so was Mahatma Ghandi).

Date of Visit: October 2024

Rating: Three stars. They did a nice job with site selection, and a number of the sites are in and around Johannesburg, making visits easier.  Since South Africa has so many natural or pre-historic sites inscribed, I was glad to see a historical/cultural one make the list.

Logistics: I organized a private day tour to visit as many of the sites as possible in a short period of time by emailing a company with a list of the sites to visit.  You could visit Liliesleaf and Consitition Hill on your own easily. You could also do Orlando West on your own or through a half day tour of the area (there are many on offer). Sharpeville is not a common visitor destination (perhaps will change with the inscription?) and would be difficult to visit on your own.