The ‘Black Memorials’ pages feature research on black memorialisation and counter-memorialisation. A range of these memorial sites can be accessed from the link at the end of this page, and they are added to regularly.
Photographs on other SAWM pages are concerned with the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and use of commemoration of the concentration camp deaths in its ideological armoury. Black commemoration and memorialisation is included in some of these these memory sites of nationalism. This happened sometimes by mistake, and sometimes as a now neglected but still present aspect of how the past was, for black as well as white people were there and involved. In addition, black memorialisation and counter-memorialisation has taken off post-1994 and has its own pages here.
The remaining traces of much nationalist commemoration, such as at Aliwal North and the Brandfort Gedektuin, 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 which seem to have taken the same form as the white cemeteries. But their fate over time was very different. Rather than being well 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.
One result at both local and national levels of the post-1994 political transition has been commemoration of those involved in the anti-apartheid freedom struggle across a wide historical sweep. Many of these are the product of the Liberation Heritage Project, an ANC government initiative.
This is a contemporary counter-memorialisation project and has produced museums, visitor centres, heritage trails, monuments, memorials and some statuary, predominantly within an ANC political frame. Some of these commemorative sites concern events from 1960 on, others the long period before, with the LHP planning to eventually include all major heritage sites.
History meets politics meets heritage; and the past and its public and at times commercialised display for contemporary purposes come together and sometimes clash.
To access the list of black commemoratives sites and the guide to black commemoration, click HERE