Beyond Collective Memory

Structural Complicity and Future Freedoms in Senegalese and South African Narratives

Cullen Goldblatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000195200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria africana

Beyond Collective Memory analyzes how two African places became icons of collective memory for certain publics, yet remain marginal to national and continental memory discourses. Thiaroye, a Senegalese location of colonial-era massacre, and District Six, a South African neighborhood destroyed under apartheid, have epitomized a shared "memory" of racist violence and resistant community. Analyzing diverse cultural texts surrounding both places, this book argues that the metaphor of collective memory has obscured the structural character of colonial and apartheid violence, and made it difficult to explore the complicit positions that structures of violence produce. In investigating the elisions of memory discourses, Beyond Collective Memory challenges the dominance of collective memory, and calls attention to the African pasts, metaphors, and imaginaries that exist beyond it.

Part I
Sites of Memory

1 Making Island Stones Speak

Criterion (iii): The buildings of Robben Island bear eloquent witness to its sombre history.

UNESCO, “Outstanding Universal Value”

Prisonniers noirs je dis bien prisonniers français, est-ce donc vrai que la France n’est plus la France?

Black prisoners, that is to say, French prisoners, is it true then that France is no longer France?

Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Tyaroye”

Thiaroye and District Six are located on the ambiguous margins of dominant contemporary memory discourses. This shared figurative position is strikingly echoed in their geographical positions: each is situated adjacent to a national and world heritage site. Thiaroye is located eight kilometers from Senegal’s Gorée Island; District Six is about 16 kilometers from South Africa’s Robben Island.

Gorée, the “île de mémoire” whose landscape “bears witness” to Middle Passage suffering, has long been a heritage site, a place of pilgrimage for the African Diaspora, and a requisite stop for visiting heads of state, colonial and postcolonial. French President Auriol went to Gorée in 1947; French President Hollande, in 2012. Both visited la Maison des esclaves,¹ a museum housed in a restored eighteenth-century home, as did U.S. Presidents (G.W.) Bush, Clinton, and Obama. Robben Island, like Gorée, is a prominent destination for international visitors, and it too “speaks” a single “memory”—of apartheid imprisonment and subsequent liberation, of apartheid evil and human triumph. Since its post-apartheid establishment as a site of national and world heritage, Robben Island—and specifically the Island’s former prison, now a museum—has been an obligatory stop for foreign leaders; as U.S. Presidents Clinton and Obama were photographed in Gorée’s Slave House, each was photographed in Nelson Mandela’s former cell on Robben Island.

The two islands offer paradigmatic examples of the idiom of memory at work. In that idiom, contemporary audiences are interpellated as remembering subjects and invited to share in a collective memory. A specific kind of narrative, testimony, is crucial: the first-person account of the survivor/witness transforms contemporary listeners, who now too “remember” past atrocity. A moral imperative to “remember” generally derives from an, often implicit, analogy between Nazi atrocity and other racist historical atrocity: we must “never forget” the one, just as we must “never forget” the other. We identify with the historical victims, we come to “recall” what we have not ourselves experienced, and our (collective) “remembrance” functions to place past violence at a remove from the present, which is thereby rendered a time of peace and unity.

The two islands also constitute an elaboration upon memory’s idiom: on Gorée and Robben Island, it is primarily the inanimate landscape that “testifies” to past evil and, in so doing, casts the present as just. As heritage sites, the islands are imagined to make the past both audible and material: the islands “speak” the “memory” that they epitomize. Buildings and stones are pressed into service as inanimate witnesses to a single “memory” of past suffering and present reconciliation. Gorée, in particular its Maison des esclaves, “is” the “memory” of the Middle Passage and a place of human reconciliation in the present; Robben Island, in particular its apartheid-era prison, still “witnesses” the injustice of apartheid and the triumph of democracy and freedom.² The imperative to remember and the concomitant demand for identificatory engagement are similar: contemporary visitors should identify with the historical victims and partake of their suffering by “remembering” it, thus participating in a project of collective healing that will prevent racist atrocity from recurring. The Nazi Holocaust is an explicit presence in the Maison: texts and tours claim Gorée as the “memory island” and compare the atrocity of the Atlantic Slave Trade to the Nazi Holocaust. In the Robben Island Museum, the Nazi Holocaust is implicit in the imperative to remember. If we visit and listen, such evil will “never again” occur, as then President Mandela pronounced at the Museum’s opening in 1997.³ On both islands, visitors are to listen to stones and walls, to identify with, and empathize with, the historical victims, and to experience a present of reconciliation and democracy that is utterly distinct from the violent past.

As heritage sites, Gorée and Robben Island “bear witness” in service of internationally recognized narratives of past violence and present unity. The notion of a witnessing landscape, which the islands’ UNESCO heritage status invites, fully obscures the constructed character of collective remembrance, thereby disavowing the acts of interpretation that make island stones “speak.” On Robben Island, even the testifying speech of human witnesses, former political prisoners, does not interrupt the totalizing “memory” that the island’s built landscape “speaks,” and the visitor is to assimilate. On Gorée, however, where visitors can observe varied engagements with the past and the present, we glimpse a gap between the place and the “memory” that it is made to signify. Encounters with commemorative plaques and guidebooks allow us to reflect upon the historical construction of the “memory” that the island is to speak and to explore some of the pasts that this “memory” elides.

“Heritage,” as it is defined in international instruments and national legislation, elicits and depends upon interlocking elements of memory’s idiom: collective identity, collective “memory,” and the moral imperative to collectively “remember.” The UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) defines ICH tautologically, and through reference to “identity”—as consisting of the “practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills,” which provides a group or community with “a sense of identity and continuity,” and which a community recognizes as its cultural heritage.⁴ The definition forcefully invites us to accept the existence of collective identity and, in the implicit call to conserve intangible heritage, suggests that we must collectively remember.⁵ The 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention, the foundational text for subsequent international conventions and national legislation, elaborates upon the metaphorical potential of “memory.” The Convention sets out ten criteria for World Heritage status (a site must meet at least one). Criterion Six—which both Gorée and Robben Island meet—invites the articulation of a site through memory’s idiom. While many criteria state that a site is exemplary or representative because of what it physically shows or contains, a site that meets Criterion Six is associated with largely intangible cultural phenomena “of universal significance.”⁶ Through the idiom of memory, places speak their connection to the past and thereby qualify as sites that are “tangibly or directly” associated with the intangible past. It is the metaphorical extension of memory, from individual to group, and from the realm of consciousness to the material world, which allows the tangible world to form a “direct” connection to the necessarily intangible past: in “remembering” and “testifying,” a site demonstrates its association with that past. Another Criterion, Three, which Robben Island meets, is itself almost expressed through memory’s idiom, asking that a site “bear testimony” to a cultural tradition or civilization.⁷

The UNESCO-supported and state-legislated association between the (intangible) past and (tangible) places invites us to take literally the idea that the inanimate material world can remember and testify. After all, heritage must be tangible, or audible, if it is to be recognized. As Jean-Louis Luxen notes, regarding intangible cultural heritage, it “[. . .] must be made incarnate in tangible manifestations, in visible signs, if it is to be conserved.”⁸ When sites are designated as “world heritage” because they testify to—necessarily intangible—past violence, visitors must listen, share in the “memory” they make material and speak, and thereby ensure that the world never “forgets.”

The UNESCO “Brief Synthesis” text for Robben Island relies upon the metaphor of a witnessing landscape. Buildings appear as the tangible manifestation of past oppression and present democracy, and as witnesses to freedom’s victory:

Robben Island was used at various times between the 17th and 20th centuries as a prison, a hospital for socially unacceptable groups and a military base. Its buildings, particularly those of the late 20th century such as the maximum security prison for political prisoners, witness the triumph of democracy and freedom over oppression and racism.

What survives from its episodic history are 17th century quarries, the tomb of Hadije Kramat who died in 1755, 19th century ‘village’ administrative buildings including a chapel and parsonage, a small lighthouse, the lepers’ church, the only remains of a leper colony, derelict World War II military structures around the harbour and the stark and functional maximum security prison of the Apartheid period began in the 1960s.

The symbolic value of Robben Island lies in its somber history, as a prison and a hospital for unfortunates who were sequestered as being socially undesirable. This came to an end in the 1990s when the inhuman Apartheid regime was rejected by the South African people and the political prisoners who had been incarcerated on the Island received their freedom after many years.⁹

The first paragraph enacts the shifts from the material to the immaterial—built landscape to “memory”—and from particular to universal that UNESCO Criteria Three and Six demand. Buildings “witness” a version of the national past that all visitors will assimilate into their own memories, thus participating in the production of a “world” heritage.

The former prison constitutes the primary location through which we are to recall a single past and acknowledge a single present. It is “particularly” the apartheid-era prison that “witnesses,” and it is the apartheid regime and South Africa’s subsequent liberation that constitute the primary concerns of this narrative. Each paragraph, while referencing the past that preceded apartheid, concludes with a mention of apartheid or the freedom that has followed: earlier periods of white supremacy figure only as preludes. The relevant past is that of apartheid; the significant building is the prison that still “witnesses” apartheid oppression.

In this “memory,” political imprisonment on the Island and the Island’s most famous prisoner come to stand in for apartheid oppression and anti-apartheid resistance, respectively. Nelson Mandela together with his imprisoned comrades appear as the microcosm of the resistant nation, a notion bolstered by the statement that “The South African people” rejected apartheid.¹⁰ By the time we reach that concluding sentence, it is clear we are to assimilate a circumscribed “memory” of apartheid oppression and freedom’s triumph: the suffering, and eventual moral and political victory, of black male anti-apartheid activists who, once imprisoned, are—like the nation they embody—now free.

The power of state- and UNESCO-supported “memory” is such that even when there are living survivors to remember and testify, as is the case on Robben Island, they speak in the same way that the landscape ostensibly does. Although guides in the former prison/contemporary museum are all former political prisoners on the Island, tour narratives do not recall specificities of the guides’ own experiences, let alone challenge or complicate the twinned discourses of national reconciliation and universal, “human,” triumph. The typically brief autobiographical component of a tour narrative contains basic information such as the liberation movement with which the guide had fought, his charges, sentence, and dates of imprisonment on the island.¹¹ Visitors are moved swiftly through the section of the prison building that held “politicals”; Mandela’s former cell is the clear highlight.

The pace and curation of the Robben Island Museum tour—generally the only way to visit the Island—mean no opportunities to interact with people other than guides and fellow tourists, little time for reflection, and no unforeseen places or texts to happen upon: in short, few encounters through which visitors might glimpse the complexity of the past and critique the politics of contemporary commemoration. The contours of my 2017 visit suggest these limitations. Upon arrival, my fellow ferry passengers and myself were swiftly shepherded along the pier and onto a bus, which then passed the house where Robert Sobukwe, founder of the Pan Africanist Congress, was held in solitary confinement, continued through the small settlement, and stopped at a rocky point facing the city, where we could disembark and photograph Cape Town. Retracing our route, the bus deposited us at the former prison, located beside the pier, where our bus tour guide, a young man with a degree in Heritage Studies, handed us over to a second guide, a former political prisoner, who led us through the former prison. At Mandela’s former cell, there was a pause for more photographs. Our guide named the charges he himself was held under and the length of his imprisonment. He also explained that the apartheid racial hierarchy informed the treatment of prisoners: “African” and “Coloured” prisoners received different diets. We were in and out of the prison-museum swiftly, and directed back along the pier to board the ferry.¹²

Given the pace and apparent thematic parameters of the prison-museum tour, it is unlikely that guides have the capacity to elaborate upon their experience, or introduce their own analyses. If guides appear sympathetic to the Pan Afr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Sites of Memory
• Part II Places of Complicity
• Part III Imaginaries of Future Freedom
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Index