Black Memorials Guide
Introduction
The photograph galleries on SAWM pages for concentration camps, other South African memorials and British military memorials derive from research projects specifically concerned with the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the use of commemoration of the concentration camp deaths in its ideological armoury. Black commemoration and memorialisation are included in this when and where appearing in the memory sites of nationalism. This happened sometimes by mistake, as when people had ‘white’ names, and sometimes as a now neglected but still present aspect of how the past was, for black people as well as white were there and involved.
The remaining traces on the ground, such as at Aliwal North and the Brandfort Gedektuin or garden of remembrance site, show there were cemeteries in which the black people who died in both the ‘white’ concentration camps and also the separate black camps were buried, and these seem to have taken the same conventional form as the white cemeteries. But their fate over time was very different, for rather than being routinely maintained and many of them instituted as Gedenktuin, they were neglected apart from by individual local communities. The state-funded infrastructure of maintenance that existed for the white cemeteries and Gedenktuin did not exist for them, for obvious reasons. Even discovering their whereabouts is difficult now, although many have recently been identified.
The Liberation Heritage Project
One result at both local and national levels of the post-1994 political transition has not surprisingly been an early emphasis at government level on commemoration of those involved in the anti-apartheid freedom struggle. However, a much larger commemoration and heritage project was subsequently embarked on through the Liberation Heritage Project, an ANC government initiative. This is a contemporary memorialisation project that is producing monuments, memorials and some statuary, museums, visitor centres, heritage trails, predominantly though not exclusively within an ANC political frame. Its programme spans the period 1652 (arrival of Van Riebeeck) to 1994 (free elections) and is detailed in an LHP document, ‘The national liberation heritage route’, with its major thrust being that of counter-memorialisation rather than removal or destruction.
The Liberation Heritage Project is described as working around an identified heritage route, marked by the sites identified in the above document. It relatedly comments that: “The Resistance and Liberation Heritage Route (RLHR) project is a national memory project aimed at commemorating, celebrating, educating, promoting, preserving, conserving and providing a durable testament of South African’s road to independence”. And it makes annual awards, among applications made under ten headings:
1. National Living Treasure
2. Local Government Commitment
3. Preferred Heritage Destination
4. Young Heritage Activist
5. Academic Excellence
6. Voice of Heritage
7. Heritage Corporate Citizen
8. Liberation Heritage Steward
9. Heritage Education
10. Heritage award recognising people with disabilities
History meets politics meets heritage; and the past appears in public and at times commercialised displays for contemporary purposes. History, politics, heritage and the past sometimes clash, but sometimes their coming together resounds.
The SAWM research project
What appears on the SAWM Black Memorials pages are the signs of a thwarted piece of research, planned but brought to an abrupt halt by the coronavirus pandemic. This was intended to track the memorial sites identified under the aegis of the Liberation Heritage Project and photographically document the key sites of the contemporary commemoration project of black majority rule, starting with the Eastern Cape and some other places being visited for other research reasons. Brief glimpses of the intended project appear here, with photographs of the included sites taken mainly from a variety of publicly available sources until such time as the research can resume. General observations are accordingly very provisional.
Some provisional observations
A surprising feature of the commemorative sites considered thus far is the prevalence of the Gedenktuin or garden of remembrance form. While this might be seen as a European influence, it was also a dominating trend in South African state commemorative practices from the 1940s on, as the concentration camp memorials galleries amply show. This is consequently a form of post-1994 counter-memorialisation that runs the risk of repetition rather than challenge or undermining the earlier examples. Another example concerns a kind of echoing or mimicking of an earlier South African example in the Isivivane memorial stones from the nine provinces. This looks rather like a variation on the 1820s Settlers Memorial on a hilltop outside of Grahamstown (now Makhanda), itself an echo of prehistoric henges in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, of which the most famous is Stonehenge.
Another interesting aspect is the prevalence of group commemoration rather than memorials to individuals, including the Cradock Four, Gugulethu Seven and Duncan Village memorials among others. Perhaps this is something distinctive about the counter-memorialisation project, in that the apartheid regime targeted collectivities, and individuals (with some notable exceptions) only insofar as they were part of such. It also reflects patterns in wider commemorative practices, where statuary and the commemoration of individuals has given way to collective memorials. Within the context of the Liberation Heritage Project, where there are commemorative statues, various of these result from private initiatives, such as the Biko East London and the March to Freedom statues (discussed below), with the proliferation of Mandela statues an exception to this.
There is also the perhaps surprising decision by the state to construct a whole commemorative landscape, rather than one-off memorials and commemorative sites, by locating contemporary commemoration in the context of heritage trails and linked to tourism. This is at the same time linked with a kind of interpretive impulse, to connect memorialisation with education and instruction about key moments and events in the liberation struggle past by associating these sites with museums and interpretive centres. This wider background is a complicated one, but as noted above can be summarised as a counter-memorialisation approach; and it has tacitly rejected removal in favour of countering and thereby relegating the earlier memorialisations of white supremacy to a sideline in the march of history.
This in turn gives rise to another characteristic, which is the grandiose character of some of the memorisation projects engaged on. One example is that the low-key and touching grave of Sarah Baartman and its associated memorial has been linked to a grandiose project to build a major museum and interpretation centre, but which has been delayed for some five years now due to a range of factors. These include contractor difficulties and corruption. They also include what appears to be the ambivalent response of the local community, in perceiving the project more in terms of jobs and competition for these, and less the wider political and historical concerns that have underpinned this initiative. The intended flagship example of this approach, however, concerns the National Heritage Monument Park in Groenkloof, Tshwane/Pretoria. It is designed to include the ‘Long March to Freedom’ statues, Heroes’ Acre, a water park, a centre for learning, memorial gardens, and an events and activities area.
Regarding the museums and interpretation sites and also some of the Gedenktuin-like memorial features, a number of these have been subject to vandalism, which might be expected given the existence of the remnants of the far right in race terms, but also neglect and decay, which might not be expected. An example is the now neglected Cradock Four site, with signs of something similar happening at the Freedom Park museum, occurring because anticipated numbers of visitors have not been achieved, in the case of the latter as a comparison with plentiful visitors to the near-by Voortrekker Monument indicates. The design aspect of the more monumental heritage sites has perhaps missed the mark, by imposing a historicist approach to memorialisation, rather than a more organic one rooted in remembered experience. Some of these latter sites are incredibly well-visited, Steve Biko‘s and Sarah Baartman‘s graves being cases in point.
At the same time, it it is important to acknowledge that some of the major heritage and memorialisation sites have flourished and have very high visiting numbers, such as the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Various of these will be included in the next phase of the black memorials research project, when the provisional observations here will be revised and extended.
Useful reading
Marschall, Sabine. (2010) Landscape of memory: commemorative monuments, memorials and public statuary in post-apartheid South Africa. Leiden: Brill.
Murray, M (2013) Commemorating and forgetting: challenges for the New South Africa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Anitra Nettleton and Mathias Alubafi Fubah. Eds, 2019. Exchanging Symbols: Monuments and Memorials in Post-Apartheid South Africa. South Africa: Sun Press.
Liz Stanley. 2004. “Black labour and the concentration system of the South African War” Joernaal vir Eietdse Geskiedenis/Journal of Contemporary History. 28, 2, pp.190-213.
Liz Stanley. 2006. Mourning Becomes… Post/ Memory & Commemoration of the Concentration Camps of the South African War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Peter Warwick. 1983. Black People and the South African War 1899-1902. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1 July 2020
