Abstract
After decades of white minority rule in South Africa democratization brought with it a wave of commemorative activities to give voice to dissident histories and memories silenced during apartheid. Yet, what happens when an insurgent past is put on display in a museum? Who decides how to represent histories of national conflict, violence, and resistance? What obligations do postconflict memory projects have to museological conventions? What obligations do they have to those they claim to represent? This chapter is about the nature and limits of museums as public spaces where past atrocities are confronted and mobilized to situate, articulate, and authenticate claims about contemporary social life. The democratization of public historical space is as much about the content of the new or revised narratives as it is about how and who produces the content. In examining how these dissident histories become mainstream through new public culture institutions, I expose the activist impulses guiding this process. I look at two projects—one closely tied to the African National Congress (ANC) and the other a more grassroots initiative—that grew out of agitation against the apartheid order and as a result of deliberation on how to grapple with its legacies. The first project is Freedom Park in Pretoria (or Tshwane), a state-legislated memorial project with origins in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
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Notes
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 6.
Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past,” American Journal of Sociology 97, no. 2 (1991): 376–420.
See Albert Grundlingh, “A Cultural Conundrum? Old Monuments and New Regimes: The Voortrekker Monument as Symbol of Afrikaner Power in a Post-apartheid South Africa,” Radical History Review 81 (2001): 95–112.
Also see Elizabeth Delmont, “The Voortrekker Monument: Monolith to Myth,” South African Historical Journal 29, no. 1 (1993): 76–101.
For a more detailed discussion of the TRC and symbolic reparations, see Ciraj Rassool, Leslie Witz, and Gary Minley, “Burying and Memorializing the Body of Truth: The TRC and National Heritage,” in After the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ed. Wilmot James (Cape Town: David Phillip, 2000), 115–27.
Also see Zayd Minty, “Post-apartheid Public Art in Cape Town: Symbolic Reparations and Public Space,” Urban Studies 43, no. 3 (2006): 421–40.
For a discussion of motivations and practices of transformation at the Voortrekker Monument, see Robyn Autry, “Monumental Reconstruction of Memory: The Voortrekker Monument,” Theory, Culture, and Society 29, no. 6 (2012): 146–64.
Thabo Mbeki, “The African Renaissance Statement,” Statement of the Deputy President, Gallagher Estate, Johannesburg, August 13, 1998. http://www.dfa.gov.za/docs/speeches/1998/mbek0813.htm (accessed May 2, 2013).
Gary Baines, “Site of Struggle: The Freedom Park Fracas and the Divisive Legacy of South Africa’s Border War/Liberation Struggle,” Social Dynamics 35, no. 2 (2009), 330–44.
Rashida Manjoo, the UN Rapporteur on Violence against Women, made this observation in her keynote address at the symposium “After the Violence: Memory” (University of Wisconsin-Madison, September 20, 2012).
Harriet Ngubane, An African Perspective on the Management of Life and Death and Its Implications for Nation-Building and Reconciliation in South Africa (Pretoria: Freedom Park Trust, 2003), 8.
Kenneth Walker, “The History of South Africa: Twice Told,” Carnegie Reporter 2, no. 4 (Spring 2004): 2–13, http://carnegie.org/publications/carnegie-reporter/single/view/article/item/101/ (accessed March 18, 2013).
Willie Spies, quoted in “FF Plus Calls for Freedom Park Boycott,” Mail and Guardian, March 20, 2009.
Mongane Wally Serote, “The Significances and Relevance of the Freedom Park in the South African Context” (Speech at the Central University of Technology, Free State, May 18, 2006). http://www.freedompark.co.za/cms/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_details&gid=58&Itemid=3 (accessed May 2, 2013).
Thabo Mbeki, “Reconciliation Day Isikhumbuto Freedom Park Handover” (Presidential Address, December 16, 2006). http://www.polity.org.za/article/mbeki-reconciliation-day-isikhumbuto-freedom-park-handover-16122006–2006–12–16 (accessed March 18, 2013).
Annie Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
Ciraj Rassool, “Making of the District Six Museum in Cape Town,” Museum International 58, no. 1–2 (2006): 9–18, here 15.
Their removal was rationalized as a public health precaution after the outbreak of the bubonic plague at docks where Xhosa were heavily employed. For more about this “sanitation syndrome,” see Vivian Bickford-Smith, “Mapping Cape Town: From Slavery to Apartheid,” in Lost Communities, Living Memories: Remembering Forced Removals in Cape Town, ed. Sean Field (Cape Town: David Philip, 2001), 15–28.
Julian Jonker and Karen E. Till, “Mapping and Excavating Spectral Traces in Post-Apartheid Cape Town,” Memory Studies 2, no. 3 (2009): 303–35.
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© 2013 Marc Silberman and Florence Vatan
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Autry, R. (2013). Doing Memory in Public: Postapartheid Memorial Space as an Activist Project. In: Silberman, M., Vatan, F. (eds) Memory and Postwar Memorials. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343529_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343529_8
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