I have been to the Apartheid Museum a few times. An impressive structure, it sits just north of Soweto and south of downtown Johannesburg. It was built next to a casino and an amusement park. The casino is owned by two white businessmen, brothers Abe and Solly Krok, who sold whitening creams to black people under Apartheid and own one of South Africa’s most successful football clubs, Mamelodi Sundowns; building the museum was part of a deal to secure the gambling license. Pause and take that all in. It is all very new South African; that is how old and new elites work together. Not surprisingly, there is a lot wrong with all this history, but today is not the day to go off on them about that. That’s for another time. This time, the Apartheid Museum is doing us a service—though not in the way it intended.

Lately, a big issue for the museum is that it is struggling “to attract South Africans and particularly younger South Africans.” So they hired an advertising firm, TBWAHuntLascaris, to devise a campaign to increase attendance.

This is what the advertising people came up with. They took to the streets (it looks like the Wits University campus) and asked young people directly what they knew about South Africa’s recent history, capturing it all on video. The young people were either asked questions or shown a series of photographs. “We simply asked them to identify a series of famous people. First, popular culture icons and lastly, a famous anti-apartheid leader.”

What stands out is that the pop culture questions are all about global American culture (sample: “Who is the artist known as Slim Shady?” “Who is Beyoncé married to?”). This is deliberate. Those interviewed usually do well on this part. All respondents are very confident in their knowledge of Beyoncé and Eminem. It is when the interviewer drops a question about South Africa’s apartheid history that things turn.

I’ve seen four videos—that’s all I had access to. I’m not sure if there are more.

In the first video, two sets of interviewees—a young black man followed by two young black women—get all the celebrity questions right. They know who Jay Z, Britney Spears, Oprah, and Tiger Woods are and why they’re famous. Then the questioner asks: “The apartheid government stripped him of his chief title.”

The correct answer is Chief Albert Luthuli, ANC leader and the first South African to win a Nobel Peace Prize in 1960. The young black man reads the question back as “the anti-apartheid government stripped  . . . ,” somehow making his ignorance worse. The two young black women, even after being offered clues (that Luthuli’s autobiography was titled Let My People Go and that he was awarded the Nobel Prize), still can’t figure out who he is. One of them deadpans: “Is he South African?” The museum campaign catchphrase—”A History Forgotten is a Future Lost”—flashes on the screen.

In a second video, the respondent, a young white woman, also gets all the celebrity questions right and is then asked: “Who coined the anti-apartheid slogan ‘Black is Beautiful’?”

The young woman responds, “I don’t know,” and accepts the offer of a clue. She is told this person started the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa and was assaulted and died in police custody. She can only laugh nervously and repeat, “I don’t know.” Steve Biko’s image flashes on the screen, followed by the campaign’s catchphrase.

In another video, Oliver Tambo—head of the ANC from the late 1960s through 1991 (and given the ANC’s central role in resistance during the 20th century, someone most people in South Africa should know)—gets the same treatment.

They don’t know who he is.

This is all terrible, of course, but one video pushed it over the edge.

In the last of the four videos I saw, two young people, one white and one black, are shown the usual photos of celebrities first: Che Guevara (not a celebrity, of course, though we know where the TBWAHuntLascaris researchers got that idea), Paris Hilton, Kanye West, Britney Spears, and Chuck Norris.

They are then shown an image of Joe Slovo, leader of the ANC’s armed wing, probably the most prominent Communist leader in the country, and later the first Housing Minister in the democratic cabinet after 1994.

The respondents hesitate, then grow confident: “An investor,” “an old man,” someone who is “very old.” When offered a clue, the black student even wonders if Slovo is “Verwoerd.” One of them finally gives up: “I don’t know him.” And then, realizing that’s the wrong answer, asks the only question left: “Are we supposed to know him?”

What are the professors teaching the students at Wits University?