On the memorial landscape
In these days of falling statues and contested commemoration, an interesting and relevant contribution to understanding the complicated array of interests involved is provided by Nettleton and Fubah‘s (2019) edited collection on Exchanging Symbols. This book and its composing chapters stems from an initiative by South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council, undertaken in the wake of Rhodes Must Fall protests there and specifically the focus on statues and other forms of memorialisation that can be associated with colonialism. The composing chapters are something of a mixed bag intellectually speaking, with some perceiving a dominating discourse which requires decolonialisation, others focusing on what is seen as a complex nexus of interests at work, that has produced the commemorative landscape as it presently exists. And this is now some 25 years or more of an ANC government following the 1994 free elections, so post-apartheid policies also need to be considered, and thus the book’s sub-title, ‘monuments and memorials in post-apartheid South Africa‘. The view of the editors is that,
“The messages conveyed through the research in these essays may well disturb and disrupt the settled views of the cultural landscape that are currently promoted and preserved in South Africa and further abroad in Africa. They could offer alternative avenues to government policy makers in South Africa, as they pinpoint government‘s failure to adopt and promote an African iconography of memorialisation… We need to not continue to replace or exchange large-scale and intimidating historical bronze statues and marble or stone monuments with others using the same materials and styles in the name of constructing a post-colonial and post-apartheid cultural landscapes. There are alternative ways of doing this…” (xiii-xiv)
However, much detail underlies this and by no means every contributor would agree that all forms of counter-memorialisation – which, expressed in simple terms, is what the policy has been – should be abandoned.
Particularly interesting chapters from the perspective of WWW research include the following Swartz, Roberts, Gordon & Struwig‘s ‘Statues of liberty’ is a very useful discussion of a large-scale representative sample piece of research looking at who favours what policy regarding existing South African monuments and memorials. Among other gems it shows that it is less the young and much more people of different age groups who have a political affiliation with the EFF who largely support removal and destruction. Sipokazi Madida’s ‘Troubling statues’ is a fascinating and indeed ground-breaking analysis of the troubled monumental landscape in South Africa, using what she refers to as ‘the post-apartheid memorial complex’ to investigate and analyse the competing interests and approaches to the past that this includes. And Fubah and Ndinda’s ‘Struggle heroes and heroines statues in Tshwane’ explores a case study of historical and contemporary symbols of statues and monuments in the former Pretoria. It focuses on a project involving hundreds of bronze statues of people known as ‘the freedom walk‘, and sees this as both a continuation and a disruption of earlier memorialisation practices.
Anitra Nettleton and Mathias Alubafi Fubah. Eds, 2019. Exchanging Symbols: Monuments and Memorials in Post-Apartheid South Africa. South Africa: Sun Press.
Last updated: 9 July 2020
