Memorialisation has been an integral part of the various contradictory processes of state formation in southern Africa from the pre-colonial era to the era of resistance to colonial conquest; to the emergence of the Union of South Africa in 1910; and to the victory of the National Party in 1948 and since the advent of the democratic state in 1994. The terminology âstate formationâ is used here as an alternative to the concept of a single nation given the historic competition and conflicts of the various ânationalismsâ in South Africa. There are several ways of thinking about what memorialisation has entailed in South Africaâs historical development from the pre-colonial period. This development is complicated by the fact that what is understood to be South Africa today did not exist as a unified political entity until 1910. Further, the idea of a ânationâ as it is currently understood emerged largely as part of a colonising enterprise on the one hand, and as a reaction to colonialism on the part of liberation movements such as the African National Congress (ANC), the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and the democratic government, on the other.
William Beinart argues that colonialism and the anti-colonial struggles did not subsume âthe old identities and social geography of African chiefdoms, [which] remained partly intact and a dynamic factor in the countryâs developmentâ. 1 Also, as pointed out by Leonhard Praeg, âany idea we may have of what âpre-colonialâ means emerges conceptually from the category of the colonial and therefore remains, in our exploration of it, contaminated by the language of the colonial archiveâ. 2 The colonial archive tends to be âcast as [a] product of discredited worldviews [together with its] relicsâ. 3 In this book, we take the view that the colonial or apartheid archive can also be understood and read as an institution and a resource that can provide conflicted and diverse kinds of information about the past as well as possibilities for multiple historical interpretations and entry points to the past(s). This argument is supported by Arondekar Anjali, who argues that the colonial archive is not fixed nor is it finite. He goes on to explain that the colonial archive is âa site of endless promise, where new records emerge daily and where accepted wisdom is both entrenched and challengedâ. 4 Consequently, there are schools of thought that re-read the tangible and intangible archive and in turn argue for the framing of pre-colonial societies as constituting groups of people who may have considered themselves ânationsâ. In the South African context, this school of thought frames the early nineteenth century as the era of nation-building, particularly in southern Africa. Writer and literary scholar Ayi Kwei Armah writes that these societies had ways of managing memories. In his article on âLiberating Mandelaâs Memory â, published in the New African magazine of March 2011, he observes that:
âŠwhen foreigners describe Africaâs old cultures as predicated on ancestor worship, what they infer is that the management of memory was for a very long time an indispensable part of the African way of life and culture. The meaning of this statement is that different generations knew how much they could benefit from the experience of their predecessors. If they lived well according to culturally useful norms, these generations would in turn add to the common pool of ancestral memory. 5
It is therefore important to note that ancient African societies preserved their ancestral and social memories in a variety of media such as architecture, medicine, sculpture, paintings, hieroglyphics/alphabet, written text, religion, beliefs, music, myths, legends, fables, nursery rhymes, izibongo, izinganekwane, proverbs, drama, performance, dance and, above all, in language.
David Bunn, writing on imperial monuments in South Africa, acknowledges the existence of such African memorial practices, not only in the âpre-colonialâ period, but also in contemporary social times. Bunn describes African memorial practices as âmemorial performances, burial sites and ancestral presences, sacred grooves and the ubiquitous stone cairns known as isivivane, the memorial division engendered in cattle-byre burialsâ, among many other forms of remembering and mourning. 6 It is important to refer to these issues from the outset as themes of âindigenisationâ, or âauthenticityâ and/or âan African signatureâ because they will at some stage be a point of reference in different chapters of this book. This is necessary because decolonisation has tended to be underpinned âintellectually, [by] the recovery of pre-colonial modes of thoughts that, it has been argued, could provide the intellectual foundation for post-colonial state-makingâ processes. 7 The opposite is also kept in mind as a guiding assumption of this bookâthat the definition of who is an African is continuously a matter of debate and that it is sometimes used in a narrow sense. Equally, this book places emphasis on questions of complexity and diversity as a methodology that prevents one from falling into the trap of understanding heritage and memorialisation in ways which Gary Minkley describes as âthe new post-apartheid heritage, [which] produces a more narrow one-sided sense of heritage as cultural difference, race and bounded identityâ. 8
At this point, it will suffice to indicate that memorialisation in South Africa has been undertaken with heightened intensity in three majorâbut contradictoryâpolitical developments. One is represented by the claims that seek to negate Ayi Kwei Armahâs argument quoted above, a position taken by colonial ideologues that the indigenous inhabitants found on the conquered lands had âachieved nothing worth recordingâ. 9 For this reason, the colonistsâ story was the one that deserved to be commemorated and inscribed on the landscape of the settler colonial nation state. This line of thought, in essence a part of remaking and reframing of histories, as well as evolving political and cultural mythologies of oppression, was at some stage part of the colonising endeavour of British imperialism, and equally part of the political programme of Afrikaner nationalism , intrinsically linked to the rise of the apartheid state and intensified subsequent to the victory of the National Party in 1948. This development was not a linear process but was part of contradictions and struggles between the ideological hegemony of British colonial interests and those of Afrikaner nationalism . At the same time, the British and the Afrikaners were also in political contradiction with African nationalism in its various phases of development, as well as with the ethos of the diverse South African liberation movement and the rejection of eugenics and racist science internationally. 10
The national liberation struggle and the post-apartheid nation-building project followed the same trends for different purposes, and with different ideological emphasis. In the literatures of the various liberation movements of the country, there is a body of writings in the form of poetry, freedom songs and pamphlets that recast resistance to colonialism and apartheid as inspired by nation-building heroes, showing that national liberation was a nation-building process in its own right. 11 Consequent to the advent of the transition to democracy in the 1990s, new themes took centre stage. Daniel Herwitz describes memorialisation and the themes of this era as âessentially an artefact of transition, [which] stressed redress, acknowledgement, social flexibility, and building a culture of human rightsâ. 12
The particular focus of this book, an exploration of the liberation heritage sites in African townships and the city of Johannesburg , their commemoration , counter-commemoration and memorialisation as collective memory , has been a subject of intense and contested discourse. These public conversations and oftentimes disputes centre largely on what is the âacceptableâ or âlegitimateâ way and medium of memorialising those who lost their lives as a result of the liberation struggle . They are also contestations based on determining whose voice or voices are âgenuineâ in the telling of the liberation struggle histories. Yet, other conversations centre on the use or even manipulation of memorialisation to express dissent and concerns about the given historical event and its links to contemporary challenges. This is made clear b...