The Same Bricks: From a Place of Torture to the Seat of Justice on Constitution Hill

A Continent in One Courtyard

Some places ask more of you than a visit. They ask you to carry something away. Constitution Hill in Johannesburg is one of them.

I was there with a group of young leaders from every corner of Africa, from Khartoum to Cape Town, Dakar to Dar es Salaam, brought together by a shared fellowship. Our programme for the day was simple. In the morning we would tour Constitution Hill, its old prison cells and its court. In the evening we would return for a reception and dinner in the yard between the two.

It sounded like a schedule. It turned out to be a journey from one South Africa to another, all within a few hundred metres of brick.

Image: Beneath the Faces of the Law
Sami Altalib, Sudan (left), and Mohamed Salat Osman, Kenya (right), stand before the portraits of the judges who shaped South Africa's Constitutional Court. Two young Africans, smiling in a gallery built on the ruins of a prison.

The Architecture of Humiliation

The tour began in Number Four, the section of the old prison complex built for black men. The air there feels heavier than it should on a sunny morning. When it opened in the early 1900s, its communal cells were meant to hold close to a thousand men, but over the years they became overcrowded, filthy and full of disease.

Our guide stopped us in the courtyard and asked us to imagine the moment of arrival. Men coming back from hard labour were not simply counted and locked away. They were searched in a ritual the prisoners called the tausa. Stripped naked in the open courtyard, they were ordered to jump into the air, spin around and spread their legs while clapping above their heads. Warders hosed them down in summer and winter alike, and the "dance" existed so that guards could look for anything hidden in the rectum. Every part of the body, the mouth, the armpits, the most private places, was made public property. The point was never security alone. The point was to remind a man, every single day, that his body did not belong to him.

Women were not spared. In the Women's Gaol, black women were made to undress in the courtyard, stripped of their underwear and forced into uniforms with their hair covered at all times.

What struck me most was that these scenes were not hidden from history. The tausa was secretly photographed from a nearby rooftop by the photographer Bob Gosani, and those images helped expose to the world what was happening behind these walls.

Image: Bowed, But Not Erased
Sculpted figures crouch in rows beneath the tin roof of the Number Four courtyard, faceless and silent, where real men once waited to be stripped, searched and counted. (Photo: Nashwa Abdelbadie)

Cells Too Narrow for a Life

Then came the isolation cells, the darkest part of a dark place. They are small, so small that a grown man can barely lie down with his arms at his sides, and so close together that the row of doors looks like a corridor of cupboards. Men were kept inside for 23 hours a day, sometimes for more than a year, living on rice water, with one bucket for drinking and another for a toilet.

Image: A Corridor of Silence
The row of isolation cells in Number Four, each door opening onto a space barely large enough for a man to lie down, where prisoners were held alone for 23 hours a day. (Photo source: whyjoburg.com/constitution-hill)

I stood at the doorway and tried to picture a full year in that space. I could not. The mind refuses. And perhaps that refusal is the lesson: some suffering is designed precisely so that no outsider can imagine it.

Two Prisoners, One Hill

Racism did not only decide who went to prison. It decided how you were treated once inside. The complex was split by race: the Old Fort for white men, Number Four for black men, and the Women's Jail for women of all races. The same crime, the same city, the same walls, and yet a different life depending on the colour of your skin. One exhibition asks visitors a single question: Who is a criminal? Under pass laws, simply walking in the wrong street without the right paper could make a black man an offender. Apartheid did not just fill prisons. It manufactured criminals.

Two names give this hill its global weight. The first is Mahatma Gandhi. He was held here in 1908 for passive resistance, after refusing to obey laws that forced Indians to register and carry passes. He was imprisoned four times during his years in South Africa, and one of those terms was served on this hill. Many historians see his time in South Africa as the place where his philosophy of non-violent resistance was shaped, long before it moved a nation in India.

Image: In the Company of Conviction
Sami Altalib beside the bronze bust of Mahatma Gandhi at Constitution Hill, where a young lawyer once learned what injustice feels like from the inside of a cell.

The second name is Nelson Mandela. In December 1956 he spent two weeks in the Awaiting Trial Block during the Treason Trial, and in August 1962 he returned for a few weeks in the Old Fort hospital, the only black prisoner ever held in that whites-only prison. Even that was racism by other means: he was placed there to keep him away from other black inmates. Mandela once wrote that you do not truly know a nation until you have been inside its jails. On this hill, you understand what he meant.

Where the Prison Became a Court

Here is the turn that makes Constitution Hill unlike anywhere else. When democratic South Africa needed a home for its highest court, it did not build it far from the pain. It built it on top of it. The court was constructed using bricks from the demolished Awaiting Trial Block, the same block where Mandela and his fellow accused had waited. It opened on Human Rights Day, 21 March 2004.

Standing in the court chamber, you can see those old prison bricks in the walls behind the judges' bench. The building is open to the public, deliberately, as a symbol of transparency, a court that has nothing to hide from the people it serves. It also houses a collection of artworks commissioned from South African artists, many of them reflecting the struggle against racism, the sacrifices made for freedom, and the importance of an independent judiciary.

There is a moment in the court's history that captures everything. In 1995, Mandela came to speak at the court's commissioning and recalled that the last time he had stood in a courtroom, he was waiting to learn whether he would be sentenced to death. The same man, the same country, a completely different relationship with the law.

Image: Justice Built from Memory
Participants from across Africa listen to a guide inside South Africa's Constitutional Court chamber, beneath the national flag and walls built from the bricks of the prison that once stood here. (Photo: Nashwa Abdelbadie)

A Night in the Yard

That evening we came back for the reception and dinner, held in the yard between the court and the cells. The same ground we had walked that morning in silence was now lit with fairy lights and filled with laughter, music and conversations in a dozen accents. It felt almost impossible, and that was exactly the point.

Image: Standing Where Others Knelt
Sami Altalib at night before the old iron gates and brick walls of the prison, now the backdrop to a celebration of African leadership.

I wore the Sudanese flag on my lapel that night. Surrounded by friends from across the continent, it felt less like a symbol of where I come from and more like a reminder of what we share.

Image: A Brother from the South
Thando Hlophe, South Africa (left), and Sami Altalib, Sudan (right), under the lights of the reception. For Thando, this hill is not a museum. It is his country's memory.

Image: Threads of a Continent
Sami Altalib, Sudan (left), and Daniel Rak, Madagascar (right), wearing a traditional Malagasy lamba and a printed bow tie. Two islands of heritage, one shared evening.

Reflections in the Aftermath

The night ended, but the contrast stayed with me. In the morning, I had stood where men were stripped, searched and broken. By evening, I was sharing a meal on that same ground with Africans from every corner of the continent, many of us carrying stories of our own countries' struggles.

What I know with certainty is this: South Africa did not erase its prison to build its court. It used the prison to build the court. Every brick in those walls carries two meanings at once: the memory of what was done, and the promise that it must never be done again.

Beyond the Walls of the Hill

As a Sudanese, I could not leave without thinking of home. Sudan today has its own places of pain, its own prisons, its own silenced voices. Standing on Constitution Hill, I allowed myself a quiet hope: that one day, the places where Sudanese people suffered will also become places of justice, open, transparent and belonging to the people.

Constitution Hill teaches that justice is not the absence of a painful past. It is the courage to build on top of it, brick by brick, and to leave the doors open so that everyone can see.

From a place of torture to the seat of justice. Same hill. Same bricks. A different nation.