11 December 2020 is the hundred year anniversary of the death of the great South African writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner. It was intended that there would be various remembrance events about this centenary occurring in South Africa, most of which are now in abeyance due to COVID-19 restrictions. Are such things to be seen as memorialisation and requiring counter-memorialisation, in the way that statues of the ‘purportedly ‘great dead‘ are? Perhaps not, because by virtue of their largely academic character they are not so much celebratory as enquiring and questioning and with a range of different viewpoints and interpretations represented.
Is this one way forward for commemoration more generally, should it perhaps becomes a matter of public performances on the part of a variety of interpreters? The audience here would become both interlocutors and whatever the opposite of supplicants is, to be persuaded and not just presented with a fait accompli, which is what a memorial in the statuary sense of the word is.
