Abstract
The legacies of the Rhodes statue and other monuments around Cape Town and South Africa are deeply imbedded within colonial and apartheid legacies. Celebratory architecture and monuments of this colonial history continue to haunt society and are incongruously juxtaposed against the post-apartheid nation and values of reconciliation. There are other monuments which have attempted to represent a post-apartheid nation, one of which is the Prestwich Memorial which houses close to 3000 skeletal remains of the enslaved and the underclass. The remains were exhumed during an urban renewal project. These remains are a visceral record of the dispossessed and their lives. They have not been adequately curated and are housed in what has been named the Prestwich Memorial, which shares its roof with the popular coffee shop, Truth Coffee. The question this essay explores is how we deal with the living memory of a violent past. This paper discusses the process of memorialisation, through theories of space and place. The two case studies presented further explore the question of how archaeology can add to the process of postcolonial healing.
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Notes
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The term “Coloured” here refers to groups of mixed race in South Africa.
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In Cape Town, the collective Black and Coloured population makes up 81% of the population with 15.7% making up the White population and the 3.3% falling to the Asian and other categories. (http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/cape-town-population/)
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Lupuwana, V., Naidoo, N. (2020). The Archaeology of Remembering: Colonial Specters and the Processes of Repackaging the Materiality of Violence, Displacement, and Disenfranchisement. In: Nitschke, J.L., Lorenzon, M. (eds) Postcolonialism, Heritage, and the Built Environment. SpringerBriefs in Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60858-3_7
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