Although the colonial period of South Africa’s history has clearly had considerable influence in shaping its contemporary political system, that influence is often downplayed in favour of a shorter-term focus on apartheid as a stand-alone phenomenon. In this chapter, therefore, we shall examine the mnemonic formation of South Africa’s colonial era, investigating how this focus makes visible longer-established dynamics of marginalisation and a continuity of unequal governance that favours the colonial powers’ descendants at the expense of those subject to the violent structures left by colonialism. We will show that the memory landscape as it pertains to colonialism is starkly divided between those who take that landscape for granted or even feel nostalgic about it and those who are seeking to challenge and transform it from different perspectives. Mutual entanglement between those two approaches is rare. The chapter will therefore illustrate the ways in which the South African memoryscape is fragmented between those mnemonic forces, which show considerable variation and diversity in and of themselves, and perhaps more so than in the case of Cyprus (analysed in Chapter 2). The various manifestations of colonialism, and of resistance against it, produce a much more complex picture of the South African post-colonial memoryscape than the commonly assumed binary distinction between black and white South African experiences.¹ Instead, articulations of resistance against colonial legacies in both material and symbolic forms have recently been gaining more traction. We will therefore show that the search for peace in South Africa will need to reflect this complexity and fluidity. An inclusive peace implies rectifying and repairing the persisting political, social and economic injustices created by colonial history. It also means that the diversity of interests, needs and positions on all the different sides needs to be adequately represented in any process that aims to restore justice to those who are disadvantaged and discriminated against by the legacy of colonial structures. To demonstrate this, the chapter will investigate a diversity of sites, agents, narratives and events that deal with the past of colonialism as well as the legacy of colonial violence. Their interplay will cast light on a segmented memoryscape that is shaped by mnemonic variations and dissonance in the ways in which European colonial presence is remembered today. We shall thus seek to understand why South Africa has struggled to achieve a peace that is considered just by most of its population and to illustrate how different forms of resistance are being mobilised to challenge the lingering power of colonialism in mnemonic terms. An exploration of the ways in which colonial memory is being countered is therefore an intrinsic element of the search for a just peace.

Colonial rule in South Africa

As in many other post-colonial societies, the history of colonial rule in South Africa as it affects the present is not a straightforward story. European efforts to colonise South Africa can be viewed in successive stages, starting with Portuguese explorers’ attempts to establish trade relations on the Cape Peninsula on the south-western tip of South Africa. This was followed by a period of Dutch colonisation there (officially launched in 1652), and then British colonial armed intervention from the late eighteenth century was aimed at securing control of what was to become South Africa. Colonial rule had manifold manifestations and included the introduction of the slave trade by the Dutch East India Company (the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC), with enslaved workers being shipped in from Dutch colonies in Asia. The VOC shipped approximately 4,300 enslaved people to the Cape between 1652 and 1795 – when the territory formally came into the possession of the British Empire (Armstrong and Worden, 1989: 112). While the VOC had initially only been interested in using the Cape as an intermediate station for ships bound for Asia, their presence soon meant the loss of land by the indigenous population, not only to the Dutch but eventually also to British settlers. At the Cape, those affected were primarily the KhoiSan (that is, non-Bantu-speaking indigenous groups, many of whom were enslaved (Abrahams, 1996)). As a legacy of that period, the great bulk of land in South Africa is still today in the hands of white South Africans, who constitute less than 10 per cent of the population (see Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, 2017).

Colonial rule also led to the introduction of the migrant labour system. Sections of the local population were expelled from areas being industrialised and consigned to so-called ‘homelands’ in remote, less fertile parts of the country; the consequent decline of African agriculture would contribute to the availability of cheap, migrant labour. By the late nineteenth century, the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and of gold near Johannesburg meant that British settlers and descendants of the original Dutch settlers (known as Boers and today referred to as Afrikaners) engaged in a race for wealth. Eventually the British army would engage with the Boers in the conflict now referred to as the South African War. The British and the Boers eventually concluded a peace accord that led to the creation in 1910 of the Union of South Africa as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire. This laid the foundations for the further formalisation of white rule and ultimately, from 1948, the apartheid state – even as much of the rest of Africa was beginning to move towards independence from white rule. When South Africa became a republic in 1961, therefore, its non-white population effectively achieved independence from Britain but without decolonisation. Many of the laws that the apartheid state would employ to segregate people based on their race had been introduced under colonial rule, including the Native Land Act (1913) and the Urban Areas Act (1923). Such legislation was aimed at ensuring the forced removal of non-white people from the centres of profit and was situated in a wider landscape of spatial inequalities (see Beinart and Delius, 2014; Parnell, 2002).

Colonialism can be seen, therefore, as an overarching phenomenon that inevitably involved diverse forms of violence. These were both direct (physical violence, forced movements of communities, land grabs) and structural-symbolic (the privileging of settlers’ needs over indigenous needs, setting up structures of inequality) (see Maddison, 2013). What all these forms of violence have in common, though, is a clear social stratification between white people and ‘others’ (including black, ‘coloured’, Asian and indigenous people),² with the white people creating hierarchies that would necessarily elevate them over the other categories they had assigned. The dehumanisation of the other through discriminatory tools of governance is part and parcel of such approaches (Kebede, 2001: 540). If we then move to understand apartheid as a continuation of, rather than a break with, colonial practices, we understand that many policies that the apartheid state exploited – such as the Land Act of 1913 which effectively dispossessed ‘natives’ – reach back to the era before apartheid. As Ramutsindela (2001: 60) demonstrates, the structures in which the South African nation has taken shape are built on the foundations of a colonial state. As a result, the ways in which cultural heritage is celebrated, that is, whether in an inclusive or exclusive manner, is a dynamic that emerges out of the post-colonial state (Ramutsindela, 2001: 79) and is therefore deeply structured by the power relations established during the course of colonial rule. Memory is the negotiating agent between the colonial past and its legacies, which continue to shape the present.

The South African memoryscape

Various local, regional and global histories intersect across South Africa’s history. However, what the country is most known for in mnemonic terms, both locally and internationally, is the period of apartheid, which shaped South African society in the twentieth century. There is a richness of academic writing on the ways in which the apartheid past is being dealt with and commemorated, from studies on the long-term implications of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) (Vora and Vora, 2004) to the memorialisation (Marschall, 2010) and artistic processing (Miller and Schmahmann, 2017) of this violent episode of history. Museums and monuments dedicated to apartheid oppression can be found all over the country: Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum and the Hector Pieterson Museum, Cape Town’s Robben Island prison and the site of Mandela’s capture in KwaZulu-Natal are just a few of the many manifestations of the effort to deal with the legacy of apartheid through memory work. It is therefore hardly surprising that the memorialisation of apartheid has become the prime marker of the country’s tourist engagement (see Björkdahl and Kappler, 2019), representing a key incentive for many visitors, especially those from Europe.

Certainly, the visibility of apartheid in South Africa’s physical heritage landscape has to be seen as intimately linked to that of the African National Congress (ANC) (Cawfood and Fisher, 2022). In a way, the liberation struggle led by prominent figures within the ANC – including Steve Biko, Winnie and Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo – is a central factor in understanding the continued popular legitimacy of the ANC, despite the numerous challenges that South Africa is currently facing. These challenges range from questions of inequality and poverty to poor housing and infrastructure, with fear and crime remaining visible markers, particularly in urban zones. A mnemonic narrative that is heavily scripted by on-going political contestations is tangible in the ways in which the nation understands both its recent past and its transition to a new, more democratic state from 1994. Nonetheless, first-hand memories of apartheid continue to be contested, incorporating a number of tensions between different social forces that have not been resolved to this day.

At the same time, we suggest that the focus on apartheid as an isolated episode that originated in 1948, rather than as a continued phenomenon of colonialism, has tended to compartmentalise and contain guilt within South Africa’s national realm. The fact that apartheid represents an institutionalisation of colonial practices in the realm of the South African state cannot be ignored, so that a clear distinction between before and during apartheid makes only limited sense. Instead, along the lines of what Gregory (2004) calls ‘the colonial present’, we could argue that colonialism successfully found ways of infiltrating the state, with the result that its influence endured beyond its formal life-cycle and was clearly seen in the governance techniques employed by the apartheid government. Therefore, while the effects of colonialism spilled into what then became known as the apartheid regime, responsibility for continuing forms of violence came to be shifted towards South African actors rather than the colonial powers. Internationally, this has naturally served the post-colonial powers, which are thus able to avoid engaging with how they are historically implicated in South African politics. Domestically, this avoidance has also meant that the topic of reparations (land return, most prominently) has partly shifted off the political agenda (Forde et al., 2021). This was possible because apartheid was, at least for a certain amount of time, considered as dealt with, and a closure achieved through the mechanisms of the TRC, which prioritised forgiveness and amnesty at the expense of redistribution and reparation (see Walters, 2009). An engagement with the colonial roots of apartheid would have required more profound, controversial and contested questions to be addressed, and would risk mobilising forces that might threaten the fragile status quo. Such an engagement has consequently often been avoided in contemporary political and academic discourses. Any interrogation of why the TRC’s mandate was limited to the apartheid, rather than being broadened out to include the longer-term legacies of colonialism, questions the extent to which the changes in South Africa in the 1990s in fact signal the rebirth of the nation (Witz et al., 2017: 2). There has indeed been a critique voiced vis-à-vis the TRC for failing to reach back into the colonial period (see Walters, 2009: 47). This is perhaps particularly surprising in a context in which it has been argued that even the mechanisms of the TRC itself can partly be traced to colonial origins (Sitze, 2013). Having said that, it is noticeable that in recent years increasing attention has been paid to the legacies of colonialism, including the status of indigenous groups, as well as to slavery and colonial resource exploitation. The higher visibility of indigenous identities in public spaces or the presence of the Iziko Slave Lodge (Cape Town), as we will outline, are indicators of these higher levels of mobilisation around the longer-term legacies of violence, illuminating historical processes beyond the immediate legacies of apartheid. Colonial legacies are not immune to emerging resistance.

This is certainly not to dichotomise apartheid and colonialism as competing memory discourses from which one has to be chosen as more salient than the other. Instead, it is to suggest that apartheid can be seen as the extension and continuation of longer-standing global patterns of oppression. Herwitz (2011: 235) suggests that without the South African War (between the British army and the Boer settlers), the apartheid state would not have come into existence – something which suggests the pathway dependencies of different historical episodes. An approach that instead considers the continuities of violence in turn allows us to view South African politics as part of a global, historical pattern and no longer absolves the colonial power from its implication in the various manifestations of violence that were introduced through colonial rule, some of which we will outline. This is particularly relevant in a context in which heritage has often been seen as inherently therapeutic (Meskell and Scheermeyer, 2008) rather than transformative. Therefore, the reduction of apartheid into a twentieth-century phenomenon may not be sufficient in addressing the traumas and socio-economic inequalities that have their origins in South Africa’s colonial past, and which continue to haunt the poorest of the poor particularly. What is more, the field of heritage continues to be marked by ‘complexity, controversy and contestation’ (Rassool, 2000: 1). History in this respect continues to be subject to social contestation (Stanley and Dampier, 2005: 110) and post-colonial questions such as land return or the continued disparities in resource distribution are at the heart of such struggles. The mnemonic representations of colonial violence are often scripted in subtle, unofficial transcripts. Witz et al. (2017: 27 ff.), for instance, stress the importance of investigating oral histories in order to gain deeper access to such marginalised voices, beyond the discourses represented in the formalities of post-colonial public spaces.

Mnemonic formation: colonialism

A notable chain of events in terms of challenging South Africa’s colonial legacies was the student protests in the context of the #RhodesMustFall campaign. The protests began in 2015 when a student at the University of Cape Town (UCT) put human excrement on the statue of Cecil Rhodes which powerfully overlooks the university campus. The figure of Rhodes, a leading British colonialist in southern Africa in the 1890s, is across the region and beyond a strong signifier of the colonial period, and the campaign quickly gained local, national and global momentum (Holmes and Loehwing, 2016: 1207). Students went to protest against the colonial legacies in the design, curricula and staffing of their universities and in Cape Town were eventually successful in having the statue removed from its central position on campus; today, only the pedestal remains as a reminder of its formerly prominent position. Certainly, the removal of the statue can only be seen as the tip of the iceberg: protests continued thereafter, linking the colonial legacies of higher education to questions of social justice in the form of the #FeesMustFall campaign. The extent to which the protests affected discussions around higher education must not be underestimated (although tuition fees were, at least initially, not raised as a grievance). The protests were received with both praise and scepticism among the wider public. However, their longer-term legacy remains to be seen. For instance, there is still an equestrian statue of Rhodes behind the UCT campus, one of the streets at UCT is still named Rhodes Avenue and very close to the campus we can still find a Rhodes High School. Similar tensions have emerged at other universities around the country as well: the University of Pretoria continues to have a reputation as a ‘white’ university, while Stellenbosch University is working, through its Transformation Office, to deal with its strong colonial and apartheid legacies.

It is particularly striking that the post-apartheid government has adopted an approach that means leaving colonial and apartheid-era monuments untouched (Marschall, 2006: 177). As a result, we can still find plenty of physical reminders of colonialism, and even glorifications of that phenomenon, throughout South Africa. With numerous statues of Rhodes still prominently in situ in public spaces, there is still a flavour of heroism around the colonial legacies as well as notions of progress, reflecting a certain romanticising of the colonial past. The government has broadly decided to not remove such physical reminders of colonialism and apartheid and has instead been funding new, modern memorials signalling the transition to a new South Africa. This decision can be read as an attempt to reconcile the colonial past with the transition to democracy – an approach that has certainly been controversial as it continues to grant perpetrators of violence public space (Herwitz, 2011: 238), coupled with a risk of further alienating local communities from the heritage that surrounds them (Ndoro and Pwiti, 2001). What this means is that there is a bifurcation in South Africa’s mnemonic landscape: on the one hand, the reminders of a violent past are still publicly visible; on the other hand, there are attempts to counter those with new memorials that signal the birth of a new nation. Yet, as this chapter will show, much of the resistance against colonial legacies does not emerge from formal, government-led processes, but is instead a result of hard work at the grassroots and the engagement of activists who have been fighting for transformation for a long time.

In terms of mnemonic stratification, it certainly has to be said that colonialism as a mnemonic formation is not divided only along the lines of race. Partly reflective of the wider mnemonic landscape of South Africa, it can be said to be primarily male dominated (Coombes, 2003: 107 ff.; Marschall, 2006: 180; Witz et al., 2017: 47), with limited change taking place in terms of how such representations are challenged. Divisions in society that are mirrored in the colonial mnemonic formation can thus be said to be intersectional, split along the lines of race, gender and class – to name but a few lines of segregation. This fragmentation is clearly reflected in the mnemonic formation around colonialism, which is shaped by competing centrifugal forces, as our analysis of sites, agents, narratives and events will show.

Sites: holding nostalgia and resistance in place

Mnemonic sites hold memory in place and give it material presence in the public sphere. In that sense, the physical landscape upon which the materials of South African heritage rest is shaped by the bifurcation between colonial and post-colonial artefacts. In fact, ‘the physical landscape remains riddled with colonial architecture and monuments that recall histories of exclusion and violent oppression’ (Autry, 2012: 147). As outlined above, while this was a deliberate strategy by the ANC government in terms of its approach to heritage, the fact that Cecil Rhodes continues to be present all over Cape Town in the form of statues can be seen as alienating to many (Holmes and Loehwing, 2016: 1212) and therefore produces a range of powerful activist responses, some of which we will outline. The sites we discuss in this chapter are only a small selection from a vast memoryscape. They have been chosen for their iconic character and their influence on the debates around South Africa’s colonial legacies.

Colonial nostalgia at the Voortrekker Monument and the Rand Club

Perhaps one of the most well-known and most contested monuments reminiscent of colonial South Africa is the Voortrekker Monument, a gigantic stone-based monument that stands on a hill outside the country’s administrative capital, Tshwane/Pretoria.³ Inaugurated in 1949, it strongly evokes the apartheid government, which erected it ‘to commemorate the Day of the Covenant, an Afrikaner holiday marking the occasion when fewer than 500 Voortrekkers, led by Andries Pretorius, defeated 10,000 Zulu fighters in retaliation for a Zulu attack in the Battle of Blood River in 1838, according to Afrikaner mythology’ (Autry, 2012: 149). Certainly, given the historical reference point that is being commemorated as the nineteenth-century Great Trek of Afrikaner settlers towards Pretoria, it can be considered a colonial monument, dating back to the period preceding the formal establishment of the apartheid system. The site itself has a rather powerful aura about it: situated on top of a hill overlooking the city and built in an imposing, monolithic style, from the outside it signals power and sturdiness. On the inside, it comes across as myth-laden, featuring romantic depictions of pilgrimage in both its carved murals as well as through the artefacts exhibited on its lower floor. There is little text accompanying the displays to contextualise the story for visitors. Instead, the space plays with imagery, visual representations and mythical depictions of colonial battles. In that vein, the eternal flame that forms part of the monument can be interpreted as the Afrikaners’ symbol of bringing ‘civilisation’ (Holmes and Loehwing, 2016: 1213), in a metaphor deeply rooted in the colonial imagination. The Voortrekker Monument sits somewhat uncomfortably in South Africa’s mnemonic landscape, acting as ‘a repository for Afrikaner material culture, which no longer fits easily into the exhibitions of national culture and history at mainstream museums’ (Autry, 2012: 155). There had been discussions about the future of the monument, which largely finances itself from visitors’ contributions, but the ANC eventually decided it should remain as a reminder of apartheid (Coombes, 2003: 20). Including a Garden of Remembrance and the South African Defence Force Wall of Remembrance, the Voortrekker has elevated itself to the status of primary mnemonic site for the Afrikaner community and continues to represent memory from the romanticised perspective of the Great Trek.

Figure 5.1Voortrekker Monument (photograph by Stefanie Kappler, November 2017)

To a certain extent, what the Voortrekker is to the nostalgic Afrikaner community is what the Rand Club in Johannesburg is for the nostalgic white, English-speaking community, descended from British settlers. Situated in downtown Johannesburg, in a rather impoverished area, the Rand Club building stands out as a symbol of past imperial glory and resource wealth. Rhodes had it built in 1887 at the height of the area’s gold rush – which was essentially the reason why the city of Johannesburg came into existence. The Rand Club was established as a private club, exclusive by nature and design, and built for white business entrepreneurs. Today it retains this policy of exclusiveness, with no random visitors allowed in. Women have only been admitted since 1993. Although it is not a museum, nor is it intended as formal memorial to an era, the club still projects a spirit of colonialism through the ways in which its interior is set out. Munro (2018) describes this as follows: ‘Rhodes’ spirit is still right there, as you move towards the bar. He stands as a custodian to the colonial past as a small bronze figure, in iconic pose pointing to a British hinterland in Africa.’ Much of the interior is indeed, if not maintained in the original material, rebuilt with material imported from the United Kingdom to retain a notion of authenticity (as a bartender pointed out during a personal visit to the club). There may be a small degree of transformation taking place at this site: there is a statue of Paul Kruger, Rhodes’ Afrikaner opponent, which could be read as a sign of atonement in respect of the Afrikaner community, as well as images of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki (Munro, 2018). This, however, does not detract from the feeling that this is still a place of the 1900s (Munro, 2018; and personal research diary, 2017). Colonialism, classism and racism are tangible within this space. They are articulated not only through the artefacts on casual display in the club and an interior design bursting with icons of wealth, but also through its closed-door policy. Despite current ambitions to revamp the space in terms of modernising it (as of 2019), it still stands as a mnemonic space, frozen in time and reminiscent of an enduring colonial mind-set that still tends to exclude non-white people, women and those living in poverty.

Figure 5.2Entrance door to the Rand Club with reflection in mirror (photograph by Stefanie Kappler, November 2017)

ANC-led heritage: Freedom Park

Rather than dismantling such colonial-era monuments or sites as the Voortrekker and the Rand Club, the ANC government has moved proactively to fund and support more inclusive memories through its National Legacy Projects, which aim to address a wider section of the population. Those projects are selected and officially identified as heritage sites deemed particularly worthy of preservation, enjoying legislative and financial support from the government.

One of the most important sites among the government’s National Legacy Projects is Freedom Park, a memorial site outside Tshwane/Pretoria, which opened in 2007 and covers a vast area of land. Freedom Park is to be seen as part of a larger collection of Legacy Projects, which all speak to the emergence of a rainbow nation and are intended to underline an appreciation of diversity as the country moves on from the years of apartheid. They famously include the former prison site on Robben Island and Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, which, according to the Department of Arts and Culture, ‘create visible reminders of, and commemorate, the many aspects of South Africa’s past’ (Department of Sport, Arts and Culture, 2020).

Unlike the Rand Club with its spirit of wealth and its recent moves to espouse inclusion, Freedom Park is pervaded with symbols of poverty and the experience of being excluded. It curates histories of slavery and colonialism and presents artefacts from this violent history. Spread across a hill adjacent to that of the Voortrekker Monument, Freedom Park can be viewed as a counter-monument to the former (Autry, 2012: 148) and was deliberately set up to form a different perspective to the Voortrekker’s romanticised approach to colonialism. To a certain extent, there are parallels: like the Voortrekker, the Freedom Park in a claim to inclusivity likewise commemorates the South African War of 1899 to 1902, and features a memorial wall including the names of around 75,000 fallen fighters from the different sides of fighting, both white and black South Africans. However, Freedom Park does not take the ‘white experience’ as its point of departure, and its strong focus on colonial history is done in an attempt to present the points of view of those oppressed by colonial violence and to feature more traditional African and indigenous world views. Particularly the objects on display in its main exhibition building suggest a focus on a pre-colonial genealogy and a pan-African approach to South African heritage. Nevertheless, the objects that visitors can view in the open air, and specifically the Garden of Remembrance, do deal more directly with some of the on-going tensions in the South African memoryscape. The Wall of Names, for instance, commemorates South African victims of various wars (including the two world wars along with the South African War) in an attempt to speak to a range of groups in the country.

Figure 5.3Part of the memorial wall at Freedom Park (photograph by Stefanie Kappler, November 2017)

In-betweenness at hybrid sites: the Castle of Good Hope and the Iziko Slave Lodge

In line with the government’s policy of juxtaposing rather oppressive sites, such as the Voortrekker Monument, with a set of newly curated sites, such as the National Legacy Projects, there are also attempts to redesign colonial-era memorial sites through a rescripting of their messages (see Forde, 2019). Although originally a colonial site, the castle in Cape Town is being rescripted to provide a perspective that is somewhat challenging to its colonial past. It certainly cannot be denied that the Castle of Good Hope – as it was called in Dutch and Afrikaans when built by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century – has a history clearly associated with colonial violence and continues to serve as a marker of colonial power (Witz et al., 2017: 106). On the other hand, there are now attempts to use the space to feature indigenous histories, as well as some artwork that can be read as problematising colonial violence. The personification of the attempted hybridisation of colonial and indigenous histories at the castle is the historically verified figure of Krotoa (also known as Eva),⁴ an indigenous woman who worked under Jan Van Riebeeck, the colonial administrator of the Dutch East India Company, and who acted as a translator between the Khoi people and the Dutch. While she can be said to have long been a somewhat contested figure, first in terms of potentially having acted as a traitor to her own community by working with the Dutch and second in relation to her being banished to the prison on Robben Island for alleged alcohol problems, she has nevertheless been claimed as an ancestor by some indigenous as well as Afrikaner groups. She represents an in-between character. To her memory, a bench was dedicated on the grounds of the castle in 2016. The bench inscription reads:

The gesture by those administering the site to dedicate a bench to Krotoa’s memory can be seen as a powerful one in terms of acknowledging indigenous histories alongside dominant colonial memories, as they are presented at the castle. Yet it is certainly remarkable that the name that is marked in bold on the bench is not Krotoa’s but that of the minister who unveiled the bench. This choice can certainly be read as a marker for the ways in which the history of Krotoa is only partly about her as a woman and a historically significant actor; at least as importantly it is an opportunity for the current ANC government to present itself as the legitimate curator of her legacy. Indeed, some of that kind of tension is tangible at the castle throughout. A source speaking under condition of anonymity pointed out that, although the site does host much that is relevant to the indigenous histories of the Western Cape, some people still feel hesitant to visit it due to its colonial and military connotations.⁵ Indeed, the castle is still army property and comes across as such to visitors as well through the presence of military personnel and arms exhibitions. Any transformative ambitions with respect to the Castle of Good Hope have therefore so far been somewhat limited in their application.

Figure 5.4Memorial bench for Krotoa at the Castle of Good Hope (photograph by Stefanie Kappler, July 2018)

Certainly, the figure of Krotoa implicitly stands for a very particular type of ‘coloured’ heritage, in how her story relates to the encounter between the KhoiSan and the Afrikaner communities, although the question of the VOC’s involvement in the slave trade is usually elided. This history can primarily be found curated in the Iziko Slave Lodge in Cape Town. One of the city’s oldest buildings, it was once where enslaved people, mainly from Asia, were held by the VOC. The museum now offers visitors a permanent exhibition on the history of slavery in Cape Town. This is complemented with a number of temporary exhibitions speaking to contemporary socio-political issues, such as gender-based violence or the question of the repatriation of human remains as they relate to colonialism. The fact that the museum oscillates between its focus on history and on contemporary issues is illustrated by its very structure: while the ground floor is dedicated to its historical and political exhibitions, the upper galleries continue to house objects that are largely unrelated to slavery (such as silverware and pottery items). The museum website suggests that those latter exhibition spaces are in the process of being updated and transformed (Iziko, 2020a), while their very existence is a testimony to the wider curatorial debates that history museums are undergoing in terms of whether they focus on an activist as opposed to a conservative approach. It also reflects the limitations that larger, formal institutions face when critically engaging with troubled histories. Much of the substantial resistance against colonialist perspectives, and efforts to recast the memory of colonialism, emerges not from such large institutions but from informal, activist spaces, such as the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum.

Figure 5.5Courtyard of Slave Lodge (photograph by Stefanie Kappler, June 2018)

Community-based museums: the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum

While the mnemonic sites outlined above tend to benefit from access to funding and institutional power, it is much more difficult for those in poorer and politically marginalised communities to create sites in which their interpretations of colonialism are curated and heard. Yet community initiatives situated outside the urban centres are reclaiming community heritage as their own. The Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum (LMLM), for instance, was established in the Lwandle township outside Cape Town in an attempt to institutionalise memories of the migrant labour system that originated under colonialism, from the perspective of those whose movement was controlled by the colonial and then the apartheid administrations (Mgijima and Buthelezi, 2006). It was set up in collaboration – as well as amid a degree of friction – with the inhabitants of Lwandle. The museum’s aim is to commemorate the harsh conditions under which the black labour force was exploited in the past. In its main exhibition space the visitor is confronted with objects relating to segregation under apartheid, as well as life stories from Lwandle community members, testifying to how they were affected by the migrant labour system. Elements of the exhibition space also flag up on-going issues of eviction in the Lwandle neighbourhood, thus weaving together elements of past and present injustices. Next to the exhibition space is Hostel 33, a space in which the museum visitor can contemplate what the crowded accommodation endured by migrant workers in Lwandle might have looked like and felt like. The furniture in the space, as well as its rudimentary sanitary facilities, indicate the dire conditions in which the workers would have been housed at the time. This experience is reinforced by the location of the museum in one of the poorer communities outside Cape Town, so that the museum visitor is confronted not only with the historical message of the museum, but also, in passing through the neighbourhood where it stands, with some of the long-term legacies of colonial-era inequality.

Figure 5.6Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum (photograph by Stefanie Kappler, July 2018)

As the sites discussed in this section have shown, there are a variety of ways in which the memory of colonialism can be curated, both in romantic and transformative terms. While the funding situation and access to political power differs from site to site, it is notable that many of the sites resort to a mechanism of formal museum communication to emplace their mnemonic messages. Curatorial differences can clearly be found between the different sites – the LMLM, for instance, places much more emphasis on oral histories than do the exhibits found in the Rand Club or the Voortrekker Monument – but there seems to be a deliberate choice of the museum format as a way of articulating, editing and presenting contested histories (Kappler and McKane, 2022). However, community museums such as the LMLM are situated within the community they seek to represent and stand in a more direct position of accountability to that same community. The memories generated at that site are therefore in direct correspondence with those who provide, shape and curate it locally.

Agents: engaging colonial memory

Actors involved in South African memory-making are manifold and can be found at local, national and international levels. They range from smaller grassroots organisations to major government initiatives promoting the curation of memories as they relate to contemporary political goals. Identifying the primary locations of agency in the field is further complicated by the fact that many of the memory artefacts are to be found in private hands and are thus not accessible to the public or are only partially accessible. This is one reason why, we would suggest, the fragmentation of memory also extends to the ways in which mnemonic agency is shaped. Quite a few smaller heritage organisations and groups tend to align themselves with particular stakeholder interests, as this ensures at least a degree of visibility and funding from their own target audience. At the same time, it also prevents any denser entanglement or cross-overs between the various agents in society and thus contributes to the development of parallel narratives, not unlike the case of Cyprus.

Curating and funding colonial nostalgia

Colonial nostalgia is curated in private and public spaces. Specifically connected with the Voortrekker Monument and its management is the Heritage Foundation (Erfenisstigting), located at the foot of the monument. The foundation primarily caters to an Afrikaner audience and sustains itself solely through donations. The kinds of memory it features (as presented in the exhibition space) certainly relay a particular version of history, with the Anglo-Boer War (elsewhere now generally referred to as the South African War) playing a central role and a memorial to fallen soldiers just outside the foundation headquarters only featuring those South Africans who died up until 1993 – the year when apartheid formally ended. The foundation thus works within a community that more or less identifies with the Voortrekker version of history and generates its income that way. Their role is to be seen as promoting the historical version of the Great Trek, both within the Afrikaner community itself and to its national and international visitors alike.

While the Voortrekker Monument is dependent on donations and ticket sales, including from tourists, the Rand Club is dependent on its own fundraising model. As a private club, it is largely run by its membership and funded by membership fees as well as by hosting events (weddings, parties etc.). The management changed recently, but the fundamental structures have remained in place, in that the membership is the main decision-making body of the club. Certainly, the figure of Rhodes, as a white, British colonialist, is crucial in articulating the kinds of actors who will typically engage in and with the club. Despite now being open to all genders and races, members can be said to be mainly drawn from the wealthier sections of Johannesburg and to be largely uncritical of the colonial legacies that are at the origin of the club. The Rand Club specifically emphasises the closed and exclusive nature of its operations, as non-member visitors were, until very recently, not allowed inside the club. In 2019, in an attempt to generate income to sustain the club’s financial situation, it became possible for non-members to dine inside the club. The management and membership are thus no longer exclusively about protecting a narrative of British colonialism; the main concern is to generate the revenues that help the club stay afloat. A degree of modernisation and an influx of new users of the space come with this decision. Such new users may be less explicitly prone to colonial nostalgia, yet still pursuing that feelings of glamour and exclusivity that the club sought to symbolise through its implicit connection with the British Empire. Such new forms of agency, in terms of who uses the space, ensure that the club takes into account its role in a changed political landscape, now reinventing itself as a commercially accessible heritage venue for events (Rand Club, n.d.).

Apart from such high-profile, larger institutions maintaining heritage from a colonial past, there are quite a large number of smaller heritage organisations, some with subtly stated group affiliations, some with the primary goal of preserving heritage at the national, South African, level. Examples would be the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation, the Gauteng Heritage Action Group, the Heritage Portal, the Heritage Monitoring Project, the Tshwane Building Heritage Organisation, the Cape Town Heritage Trust, among many others. They tend to share a focus on the built environment, that is, tangible heritage, and are often operated by volunteers. It is noticeable that not all, but the majority, of the smaller organisations focusing on tangible heritage are run by white South African communities and often the heritage that is to be protected attracts mainly white tourists (see Snowball and Courtney, 2010: 567). As a result, the bifurcation of heritage activism is, perhaps inadvertently, mirrored in the kinds of areas and heritage that are deemed worthy of preservation by such organisations. Their concerns tend to reflect a more privatised agenda in terms of representing small sub-sectors of the population and stand somewhat in contrast to the more inclusive ambitions implied in the ANC government’s declared agenda. It also means that their agency is considerable vis-à-vis their own host communities, yet is limited with respect to an engagement that reaches across the already interested and involved volunteers.

ANC-led agency: memory and the state

From the government’s point of view, and in response to the strong presence of colonial nostalgia in the South African memoryscape, the Department of Arts and Culture has established National Legacy Projects that receive government support in their heritage work. These are primarily focused on, although not limited to, the heritage of the apartheid period and represent important reference points for domestic politics and also for being placed on the tourist map. Particularly with respect to obtaining donations from European donors or tourist income, a focus on apartheid history has of course been a more common approach than a focus on colonial oppression, locally and globally (see Rassool, 2000). However in terms of visitors to those sites, it is somewhat striking that, despite the curatorial efforts at Freedom Park, the Voortrekker Monument has around fifteen times as many visitors (Jethro, 2016: 456). Indeed, during a personal visit to both monuments in 2017, on two subsequent days, the Voortrekker Monument was overcrowded, particularly with tourists arriving by tour buses, whereas we seemed to be the only visitors at Freedom Park. In that sense, the two adjacent memorial sites serve very different audiences and are used very differently. The road connecting them has, with powerful symbolism, been named Reconciliation Road but does not seem to be regularly used by pedestrians or cars.

Freedom Park is less financially dependent on visitor numbers than is the Voortrekker Monument, given that it enjoys considerable government support and funding. It is a flagship project that symbolises what the ANC government seeks to embody, namely the notion of a ‘rainbow nation’, shaped by the struggle against an oppressive past and going forward through a pan-African prism. Like some of the other government-supported heritage sites (Robben Island being a particularly prominent example), such sites generate a degree of income through sales of entrance tickets and also fulfil the role of narrating a history from the perspective of the ANC. This agenda can be read as a way of diplomatically mitigating the more exclusive aspects of heritage that romanticise colonial rule in South Africa, without necessarily explicitly condemning it. And while Freedom Park may enjoy its status as part of the government’s Legacy programme, its outreach into wider society is hampered by the lack of visitors, and perhaps by the fact that potential local and national visitors may feel this site is not in a strong position to address questions of inequality and the continuing influence of the colonial era.

Curating in-betweenness

Another formal memory institution, the Castle of Good Hope, is connected to the government’s overall approach to heritage in terms of recontextualising some of its problematic colonial heritage. Certainly, some agency has to be ascribed to the curators of the actual sites that speak from positions of in-betweenness. The castle, a site with historical authenticity, is administered by the Castle Control Board, which has oversight of the museum’s curatorial activities and continues to house the Cape Town Highlanders Regiment, thus maintaining a link to its military history. At the same time, the ways in which the narratives of the KhoiSan (in this chapter explored through the symbolic role of Krotoa) are advocated have to be seen from beyond the walls of the museum, including the work of memory activists, among others. For instance, the activism of the KhoiSan groups and descendants of Krotoa have been important in understanding the ways in which the castle has approached its historically problematic role, in the life of Krotoa and beyond. Jethro (2017: 350) outlines the protests mounted by those groups in 2015 over the fact that Krotoa was memorialised through a bench, an item that is used to sit on or, unfortunately, to urinate against. This protest is linked to the KhoiSan’s return of Krotoa’s spirit to the castle the following year, a process through which the agency of the past curators and that of the KhoiSan became intertwined, in an attempt to find ways of commemorating Krotoa in a dignified way. It has to be seen as part of a larger picture in which Krotoa is discussed as a key mnemonic character in terms of understanding her role as an in-betweener between the KhoiSan and the Dutch colonisers, whether that be through literature (see Conradie, 1998) or a controversial film, Krotoa, made in 2017.

In comparison, one could argue that the slave narrative is somewhat more centrally controlled by the curators of the Iziko Slave Lodge. The museum at the Slave Lodge, however, also maintains links to the KhoiSan communities and involves them in a number of its projects. In addition, while the permanent exhibitions of the Slave Lodge are directly ascribed to the museum’s curatorial agency, and highlight the Cape Carnival as a marker of the rich cultural heritage introduced to the area by enslaved people, the site also hosts a number of temporary exhibitions that transcend the immediate original focus of the Slave Lodge, instead drawing links with contemporary agendas linked to oppression and inequality. One such temporary exhibition on show in 2018 was entitled I am What I am, and was curated collaboratively with photographer Irene Grobbelaar-Lenoble and SWEAT (the Feminist Collective at the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce) (Iziko, 2020b). Such collaborations highlight the intersectionality of the issue of oppression and marginalisation, and are thus addressed by a diverse set of actors inside and beyond the space of the Slave Lodge. The Iziko Slave Lodge also receives frequent school visits and entertains strong links to schools in the area. Museum education specialists, therefore, have to be seen as important actors in terms of scripting the Slave Lodge’s narratives for a younger audience as well.

Community-based heritage activism

In addition to the work that larger-scale institutions such as the Iziko Museums group do, an increasing number of smaller initiatives are challenging the dominance of white and government activism in the heritage field. The LMLM is certainly not the only community-based museum; it vaguely follows a similar path to that of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, which builds its curatorial effort on its origins in, and links with, its immediate surrounding community. Some community regeneration initiatives pursue this same aim, including working with marginalised voices in the emergence of memories. This is particularly important, as McEwan (2003) has suggested that the voices of black women had largely been excluded from the narration of the truth and reconciliation process. This process of exclusion can certainly be extended beyond the scripting of apartheid, as it represents a colonial hierarchisation of memory actors and narratives alike (McEwan, 2003). However, undoing the hegemonic and deeply engrained scripting of colonialism from the perspective of the most powerful and wealthy stakeholders in society remains a difficult challenge for those engaged in a rather fragmented and privatised public space. The dominance of only a few well-funded and politically supported initiatives may not be very surprising in a context in which alternative voices and archives struggle for institutional survival on a daily basis. Specifically, what the LMLM has achieved is to have secured the involvement of the politically, geographically and economically marginalised Lwandle community, as well as a new set of curators, thus enhancing the diversity of actors engaged in the memory and heritage landscape. Despite some tensions in the relationship with the local community (see Mgijima and Buthelezi, 2006), the museum now draws on a different set of actors in its curatorial activities. The fact that the museum is situated in the heart of the community it seeks to represent, alongside its wider, national focus on migrant labour, means that it is, at least to a degree, accountable to this community. The museum has to have dialogue with its community to survive. It also acts as a source of income for some members of the community, albeit on a small scale, which means that the Lwandle community is directly affected by the museum, its visitors and its economic activities.

Overall, the analysis of agents in the colonial memoryscape has shown that there is some intense competition over the shaping of the colonial memory discourse, ranging from a certain glorification of the era to a more explicit statement of the long-term negative effects that colonialism has had, particularly on indigenous and other politically marginalised communities. It becomes clear that the curators of the different mnemonic sites play a key role in articulating different social and political positions, thus shaping a kaleidoscope of narratives, as we will now attempt to show.

Narratives: a segregated memoryscape

It is understood that in a spatially and temporally segmented mnemonic formation, the fragmentation of agency also translates into the narratives that are being deployed to script the past. Witz et al. (2017: 223) point out that a characteristic of South African memory narratives is that they tend to be highly directed:

Following this line of argument, narratives of heritage follow the mnemonic physical infrastructure of the country, with specific narratives ascribed to specific parts of the country. This can certainly be considered colonial in nature, in that colonial governance itself sought to subdivide the country into different zones of profitable labour, ‘homelands’ and zones of transition (see Kappler, 2020). Such divisions in turn produce narratives that ascribe particular qualities to spatial entities. However, the scripting of narratives is not only geographically determined; it is also ideologically bound. As with the lines of divisions within sites and agents, so can mnemonic narratives be broadly categorised into those that romanticise and whitewash colonial governance on the one hand and those that take a critical stance vis-à-vis colonial practices on the other. The latter tend to raise debates about land distribution, museum returns and reparations, and are particularly vocal in activist and grassroots circles. This, again, echoes some of our findings from Cyprus, as well as from Bosnia and Herzegovina, where much of the resistance against nationalistic discourses emerges from a community of activists.

Colonial nostalgia narrated

As far as colonial nostalgia is concerned, some of the nuance can be found in the debates around white-on-white violence, for instance. One of the key reference points, specifically in the Afrikaner community’s narratives, are the concentration camps set up by the British (see Stanley and Dampier, 2005). The conditions under which specifically Afrikaner women and children found themselves in those camps are therefore well communicated within that community. This narrative is promoted at the Voortrekker Monument and portrays the British as enemies of the Afrikaner people (Witz et al., 2017: 57), rupturing the notion of colonial glory to an extent. However, it has to be added that this narrative of white-on-white violence is somewhat detached from its colonial underpinnings as, for instance, black and other non-Afrikaner victims have long been edited out in the official commemorations of the concentration camps (Stanley and Dampier, 2005: 101–2). There are now attempts to rectify this narrative so as to increasingly acknowledge the numerous black victims of the camps (Stanley and Dampier, 2005: 108), marked, for instance, by the more prominent relabelling of the Anglo-Boer War as the South African War, as both white and black South Africans died in it. The complex hierarchies of forgetting come to the fore in this debate.

As a result, contestations around the ways in which different victim groups of the past should be commemorated, and how, continue to feed into political debates in the present, not just between the different ethnicities but also within them. This is a question of acknowledgement and dignity for many. For example, such contestations fed into political tensions around two competing commemoration events held at the Voortrekker Monument in 1988. During those events, South Africa’s Conservative Party accused the ruling National Party of having sold out the national cause to the British during the ceasefire after the South African War (Autry, 2012: 152). The fact that the contestations about the right narrative of the war came at a time when the apartheid government was at a weak and vulnerable point was no coincidence. The political tensions of the 1980s provoked the emergence of competing notions of nationalism and whiteness. The different political notions of white South African identity and its place in history served to channel on-going political tensions faced by the apartheid state. Yet again, the issue of the black victims of the South African War was relegated to the background, something that reflected the hierarchy of victims that is constructed in those mnemonic narratives.

In sharp contrast to the Afrikaner narrative of being the victims of the British, the kinds of narratives promoted around the Rand Club centre on the wealth generated by the mines (not least due to the club’s physical proximity to the banking district of Johannesburg), the figure of Cecil Rhodes and the British royals’ connection to the club. A city tour guide unrelated to the Rand Club emphasised the visit to the club made by then British monarch Queen Elizabeth II as reinforcing its identity, while remarking in passing on the contested reception she had received in a city that is marked by the exploitation on the part of the British Empire.⁶ The legacies of the empire, those who support it and those who continue to be its victims thus link to vastly different accounts, not only of the past but also of the present relationship of South Africans to the era of British dominance.

At the same time, many of the narratives spun in terms of South African memory have to be seen as directed to an economically important stream of incoming tourists. It certainly has to be acknowledged that many tourists, particularly ones from Europe, show only limited interest in terms of exploring the complicity of their own countries in South Africa’s complex colonial legacies. A more nuanced picture, as opposed to the black-versus-white narrative of apartheid, is rarely presented to tourists. As a result, the dominant narrative marketed to tourists is that of apartheid or a rather romanticised version of colonial history. Witz et al. (see 2017: 83 ff.), for instance, explain how the narrative of the tourist experience in South Africa is largely guided by romantic depictions of colonial-era villages. Instead of questioning colonial violence, tourists experience a narrative of colonial Africa in which ‘civilisation’ meets indigenous villages. Given that much of the national economy hinges on tourism, it is not surprising that representations that play down colonial violence have become deeply engrained in local and national mnemonic narratives as well. The associated need to market, professionalise and commercialise memory narratives to make them attractive to a transnational audience is part and parcel of this process (Björkdahl and Kappler, 2019). In the debates about how the centenary of the South African War should be commemorated (which we will outline in further detail later in the chapter), it was rather obvious that the tourist gaze was an important factor shaping the design of the various commemorative events (Grundlingh, 2004: 369). The ways in which the celebrations were presented were substantially designed in the light of how appealing they would be to potential international audiences, and this set the tone for the mnemonic narratives that were created domestically as well.

ANC-led narratives of the rainbow nation

The main narrative recalling the recent past promoted by the ANC is that of apartheid, Nelson Mandela’s legacy and post-apartheid reconciliation. Of course, this does not represent how the past is remembered nor is it a coherent narrative among black South Africans, as the legitimacy of the reconciliation-based narrative is increasingly facing resistance, not least from the party of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF); they emphasise the need for land redistribution and call for more drastic decolonisation measures generally. In that context, much of the (somewhat waning) acceptance of the ANC among the broader public is grounded on the liberation struggle, which the party uses as its main currency for the consolidation of power, along with notions of pan-Africanism. The Legacy Projects therefore first and foremost aim to highlight this struggle and to support projects that emphasise the notion of a rainbow nation, in a spirit of inter-racial reconciliation. Freedom Park’s above-mentioned memorial wall, for instance, deliberately includes non-white victims of the South African War – a clear counter-narrative to that of the Voortrekker Monument. Interestingly, certain Afrikaner groups opposed this wall on the grounds that the soldiers of the South African Defence Force were not included in it, although they can be found in the Freedom Park’s archives (Autry, 2012: 159). Eventually, this criticism was somewhat appeased by including on the wall the Afrikaner victims who fell in the South African War (Autry, 2012: 159). In that sense, mnemonic contestation has been a key feature of this site as well, despite its more inclusive ambitions.

It is worth noting, though, that the museum belonging to Freedom Park consists of different elements, with the permanent exhibition referring to colonial injustices and oppressions, whereas the outdoor spaces of the museum primarily pursue a discourse of inclusion and reconciliation. The tension between these two narratives has not been resolved by the curators. Instead, it is up to the visitors to make sense of the friction between these two different narratives in the same museum. A degree of romanticisation and nostalgia for the pre-colonial era seems almost unavoidable in this context: the image of a peaceful pre-colonial African continent juxtaposed with symbols of post-apartheid reconciliation provides a language that suggests an overall political consensus that has been merely interrupted by a period of inequality and segregation.

Narratives of in-betweenness

The curation of colonial narratives is notably different with respect to the question of slavery, which was widely used within the area that is now South Africa as a colonial tool for procuring unpaid labour, but which has long only enjoyed limited mnemonic attention outside the confines of the Iziko Slave Lodge. Indeed, the discourse on slavery and the associated identity groups was somewhat submerged by apartheid politics during the era of apartheid (Worden, 2009: 26). It is only in recent years that slavery as a phenomenon worth remembering and talking about is gaining more prominence, particularly in the Western Cape, where European colonialists brought in many enslaved people from Asia, roughly from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century (see Worden, 2009), while some enslaved people were also brought in from elsewhere in Africa. The Slave Lodge in its displays is increasingly trying to link Cape Town’s slavery history to on-going political challenges, not only in terms of the legacies of slavery on the Western Cape, but also pointing to techniques of modern slavery that represent a continuation with, rather than a rupture from, a legacy of oppression and forced labour. At the same time, despite a growing interest in enslaved people’s heritage and ancestry, a curator suggested that there continues to be a high degree of denial about the histories of enslaved people in South Africa.⁷ This tendency raises some of the challenges that arise when dealing with difficult and violent histories: how can justice be done to such violent histories while finding adequate, aesthetic ways of commemoration? This question sparked particular debate when Cape Town mayor Helen Zille facilitated the erection of a new monument dedicated to slavery in Cape Town, very close to the Slave Lodge. This monument is situated next to the slave tree site, where memorial inscriptions on the ground note that a tree once stood under the shade of which auctions of enslaved people would take place. The newer monument consists of a number of black memorial stones, each engraved with attributes linked to Cape Town’s history and legacies of enslaved people. The inscriptions range from place names to religion and languages, yet without a formal explanation for the possibly uninformed visitor. Worden (2009: 39) points to the controversies around this monument, specifically noting that its content is rather obscure and lacking historical context. Certainly, the attempt not to script the narrative or direct the spectator clearly in terms of the messages communicated can be upsetting for those who would like their violent histories narrated explicitly rather than suggested or vaguely alluded to. It can therefore be said that the narratives presented at the Iziko Slave Lodge aim to provide a detailed, mainly fact-based, historical narrative of slavery, tied to the physical space of the Slave Lodge, whereas this more recent monument attempts to play with abstraction and subjectivity. It deliberately refrains from a specific scripting as to how the memory of colonial slavery should be commemorated.

In contrast, finding markers that draw attention to the suffering of the KhoiSan are rather rare, and only in 2020 did the government agree to a heritage route dedicated to highlighting KhoiSan heritage. The above-mentioned film centring around the historical figure of Krotoa may be read as an effort to put the role of the indigenous population in the spotlight, but it has been accused of romanticising colonialism. In general, many of the narratives that relate to the history and violence suffered by the KhoiSan are limited in their visibility in the public sphere and need to be actively sought out. For instance, the Castle of Good Hope has an exhibition of historical paintings, grouped as the William Fehr Collection. The paintings in this collection are not explicitly narrated but are presented to an interested audience. The exhibition does not form part of the official visitors’ tour of the castle. In our personal experience, it was by coincidence that a museum guard pointed out a painting by Thomas Baines, entitled Victoria Falls with Stampeding Buffalo, which depicts a group of colonialists as hunters chasing buffaloes off a cliff. Hidden from direct view are indigenous hunters, withdrawing into the bushes, threatened by the weapons of the colonialist hunters as well as witnessing the loss of their prey in an act of brutality. It is certainly unlikely that the nineteenth-century British painter Baines had intended to make a statement about the brutality of colonial hunting; picking up on this narrative therefore remains a challenge for an interested audience or those deliberately looking for signs of suffering as experienced by the indigenous populations in and around South Africa. This is, however, changing. The Iziko Museum group (2020c), acting as curators of the William Fehr Collection, offers critical thoughts on the collection on their website, outlining a critique of the colonial structures represented through it. In that sense, the multi-media presence of Iziko helps present a more dynamic narrative to an online audience, although it is one that can be ignored by those who prefer to stick with a quick, and most likely uncritical, visit to the castle.

Community-based narratives and their wider significance

The LMLM’s move to memorialise the migrant labour system – which was a typical colonial strategy of maximising profitability – from the perspective of those exploited by it certainly presents a very different kind of narrative to the one usually presented in urban centres, which is primarily directed at a tourist audience. Located outside the main urban areas, the narratives at the LMLM have limited reach outside the museum’s immediate geographical location. Nonetheless, the aim remains to attract a tourist audience here as well, which may be one of the reasons why the museum largely scripts migrant labour as an apartheid legacy rather than a colonial one, with a focus on artefacts such as the infamous passbook (dompas) and signboards preserved from the apartheid era. In addition, the move from oral histories to museum practice can be read as a sign that Lwandle’s narratives are being framed for an audience beyond its immediate locality, given that museum practice has often been seen as a Western practice (Minkley et al., 2017). In addition, the museum represents migrant labour not only as a localised issue for the Lwandle community but as a national question as well (Murray and Witz, 2014: 139). Indeed, migrant labour has been used throughout South Africa and is particularly prominent among the workforce working on the mines around Johannesburg. The LMLM’s framing of migrant labour as a national question can therefore be read as an attempt to move out of a space of liminality vis-à-vis the tourist sector in Cape Town and, by connecting to narratives from other parts of the country, to claim a more central space in the mnemonic landscape of South Africa.

What this analysis of mnemonic narratives in relation to colonialism has shown is that they are shaped by factors such as how accessible they are (location) and by whom they are promoted (agents). These factors in turn determine, not exclusively but to a large extent, what degree of nuance and resistance can be introduced. In a way, the need to speak to a global tourist audience must not be overlooked, especially in terms of how the complexity of domestic debate is reduced, translated and curated in the mnemonic spaces discussed in this chapter. The physical spaces and their scripted narratives are thus restricted in their flexibility to shape more complex storytelling. We therefore find very limited degrees of entanglement between the narratives glorifying colonialism and those that memorialise the violence colonial rule has been based upon. They may relate to the same reference point – colonialism – but they differ so much in their language, audiences, reach and ambitions that they reach out in different directions.

We will now turn to an analysis of associated mnemonic events, in order to investigate the extent to which those allow for a more dynamic representation of mnemonic trends.

Events: commemoration in a post-colonial setting

Commemorative events can be very diverse in nature: they can be politically heated or merely routinised practices embedded in the everyday. Often, either of those have a connotation of nostalgia in terms of an attempt to time-travel into a different time in history, whether that be in relation to celebrating colonialism itself or pointing to the multi-faceted nature of resistance against it. They come in different shapes and forms, ranging from bigger movements (such as the above-mentioned #RhodesMustFall campaign) to local community events, from informal activities to formal public holidays. And while the reach of those different events may differ, they represent performances of memory, which have affective and persistent effects on people’s relationships with the past as they experience and live it in the present.

Celebrating colonial nostalgia

In the South African calendar of mnemonic events, the centenary of the South African War has received particular attention as a ‘cult of centenary’ (Grundlingh, 2004: 359), not least with respect to the different ways in which the country’s different constituencies relate to it. This is facilitated by the fact that the war does not have a specific site for its commemorations, as the relevant mnemonic sites are spread throughout the country. The mnemonic fragmentation is thus spatial in nature but not exclusively so. Dominy and Callinicos (1999), for instance, point to a number of controversies that emerged around the centenary planning process throughout the 1990s, in terms of whether it would be done in a controversial or conciliatory manner, who would host the main festivities, and how and where those would be held. Certainly, the most hotly debated question was around which kinds of actors in the conflict would be remembered at the event. In the end it was decided that all participants and victims of the war were to be commemorated, whether Boers, indigenous Africans or British. This was a conciliatory step, although many controversies remained around what a just way of marking this historical event would look like (Grundlingh, 2004: 363–4; Witz et al., 2017: 164). According to Dominy and Callinicos (1999: 396), this constituted a particular challenge for museums as there was no clear consensus about how many black South Africans had actually been involved in the war. One important step, after all, was the government’s decision to label the war officially as the Anglo-Boer South African War (Grundlingh, 2004: 361) rather than just the Anglo-Boer War, as a symbol of honouring the many black victims whose destiny had largely been neglected before. That was perhaps one of the key achievements of the centenary commemorations, despite an otherwise high degree of marginalisation of African perspectives and actors from these events. This is the background against which we illustrate in the following section the post-apartheid decision to rebrand the majority of public holidays to include African events in the commemorative calendar.

Institutionalising ANC-led commemorative days

The tensions around the commemorative events related to the legacy of apartheid translate into the wider commemorative calendar in South Africa, particularly with respect to the ANC’s decision to turn the old, often colonial, national holidays into a new set of holidays, renaming them and giving them a new purpose. For instance, Van Riebeeck Day, Kruger Day or Day of the Vow were abolished and replaced with alternative holidays, such as Mandela Day (Nelson Mandela’s birthday, a day South Africans are encouraged to dedicate to working for charitable purposes), Youth Day and Reconciliation Day. As part of the South African post-apartheid nation- and state-building exercise, it became important to rebrand national holidays accordingly (see Becker and Lentz, 2013: 2). This sent powerful messages about what kinds of history would be celebrated and commemorated, as well as signalling a reassignment of the weightings in victim hierarchies. In this context Becker and Lentz (2013: 4) argue as follows: ‘national holidays per se do not necessarily reinforce national unity and integration; they can just as well intensify debates and conflicts about what vision of the nation and which future course in respect of the rights of minorities should prevail’.

Certainly, the manner in which such national holidays are endowed with meaning depends on how they are aesthetically performed by different actors (Becker and Lentz, 2013: 5). The government may have set the framework for a new set of national holidays, but has only limited control over which groups of the population engage in, or resist, the celebrations. The erection of the Voortrekker Monument in 1949, for instance, on what was until then Dingaan’s Day, symbolising the defeat of the Zulu warriors, and was also known as Day of the Vow and Day of the Covenant, is clearly a legacy that is hard to rebrand as an initiative for reconciliation, although the date, 16 December, is now called Reconciliation Day as part of the renaming of national holidays that took place at the end of the apartheid era. Most South Africans are aware of these changes, although engagement with this new South African holiday remains uneven. The Voortrekker Monument continues to host a celebration on that day that ties in with its colonial histories, gathering a community of nostalgic Afrikaners when the light hits the empty tomb at its base – somewhat defeating the notion of reconciliation as the ANC aims to define it. And while the government’s renaming initiative may not have put an end to the colonial nostalgia of some, it still symbolises a mnemonic turning point in the ways in which uncritical evocations of the colonial era are deemed acceptable in the public sphere. The initiative has had the effect of confining colonial nostalgia to specific, clearly delimited commemorative spaces.

Events: the ambivalence of in-betweenness

Apart from the more nationally directed and government-led national holidays, we can also observe some shifts in the ways in which indigenous histories are rescripted through selected events at a more local level. In the context of the legacy of Krotoa, the Khoi woman who worked for Van Riebeeck, a number of mainly KhoiSan groups organised events to reinstate her somewhat compromised reputation. Just as with the unveiling of the bench at the castle outlined earlier in the chapter, it was important for a group of KhoiSan followers to organise a spiritual event during the course of which Krotoa’s spirit was taken to a new burial site, away from the castle where she had been brutally tortured. However, the memorialisation of Krotoa is certainly not without contestation within the indigenous communities either. On the one hand, placing the bench to commemorate Krotoa as a gesture was appreciated by some of the indigenous communities who attended its unveiling ceremony and performed a ritual to mark the event spiritually. On the other hand, the protests against the commemoration of Krotoa with a bench that people can sit on, as we outlined earlier, point to the competing narratives as to how she should be commemorated and in what historical role. The protests are particularly indicative of the competing narratives relating to Krotoa, as either a revered ancestor of the KhoiSan population or as a traitor for collaborating with Van Riebeeck (see Samuelson, 2007). Events around the indigenous heritage of the Western Cape specifically tend, however, to be rather small in size.

In sharp contrast to this, and connected with the Iziko Slave Lodge’s focus on the cultural diversity introduced by the slave trade, the annual celebrations of the Cape Town Carnival are rather large. Speaking to local, national and international audiences alike, the carnival represents a celebration of diversity and is organised with the collaboration of a number of community groups. It dates back to colonial times, when enslaved people were given a day off work to celebrate alongside the European colonisers. Today, it represents an important factor for tourism in Cape Town as the carnival lends itself very well to marketing purposes in terms of South Africa’s new identity as the rainbow nation. The status of the carnival as an officially approved celebration certainly supports its efforts to project a diversity branding – something that community-based heritage associations find harder to do.

Community-based heritage celebrations

Events speaking to community-based heritage are often (though not necessarily) locally contained, as they each relate to a particular contextual setting. This may involve community high tea or lunch meetings (as happens in Cape Town’s Homecoming Centre, which belongs to the District Six Museum) or community-based celebrations. The LMLM website (www.lwandle.com), for instance, announces events including a Christmas party, a book launch and anniversary celebrations. Events in the museum may not take the form of highly institutionalised and generously funded events; they are more likely to focus on immediate community needs and engagement activities. School visits are one way of establishing educational events that eventually become routine, while at the same time highlighting the narratives promoted at the museum. This does not mean that high-profile events do not take place: the LMLM proudly talks about its opening event in 2000 by the famous ‘poet and ex-Lwandle resident, Sandile Dikeni’ (Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, 2020). Such occasional highlights in the museum’s calendar place it in a socio-political context and endow the museum with authority, both vis-à-vis its own community and the wider national and international sphere.

What can generally be said about the ways in which events specifically have challenged colonial legacies is that they have been the most flexible of our four categories of analysis, namely sites, agency, narratives and events. Events have been able to mobilise at least parts of society more quickly and have shown some real transformation in the texture of the mnemonic landscape in South Africa. This is partly due to their ephemeral nature, which resists institutionalisation and control. At the same time, the fragmentation of memory does remain, too; most events are not shared in a cross-ethnic way by various sectors of the population, as the organisation of, and participation in, events is still split along the lines of colonial-racial identities.

The SANE analysis: memory and the quality of peace

As the interaction of colonialism-nostalgic and colonialism-resistant sites, agents, narratives and events has shown, South Africa’s colonial legacies are still very much present in the contemporary political sphere, despite the attempts and efforts of a variety of memory entrepreneurs to move beyond colonial frames. Often, the continued presence of colonial structures is couched in the language of apartheid, as the two phenomena are closely linked historically, with the latter building on the foundations of the former. Apartheid, as a strongly visible mnemonic formation, can therefore not be seen as isolated from colonialism, but as a continuum.

In relation to the mnemonic formation of colonial violence, this chapter has shown that sites, actors, narratives and events are fragmented and compartmentalised in nature, in the sense that there are some elements that romanticise colonial violence, whereas there are other elements that resist and challenge the associated historical injustices. These elements tend to be mutually disentangled. Both camps are fragmented within themselves, so a complex, segmented mnemonic landscape emerges. As those elements are hardly in dialogue with each other and mutual entanglement is limited, the ways in which resistance against colonial legacies is debated struggle to reach into those spheres in which they most urgently need to be heard. This then means that the legacies of the colonial past, with the associated structural inequalities, tend to be discussed in rather contained spaces and their expressions tend to fail to reach across different memory strands. This is comparable to the mnemonic divisions of the two museums of national struggle in Cyprus.

Questions of historical accountability, including issues of reparations and land return, do not tend to be popular discussion themes among the white South African community. The silence around those questions is quite tangible in those circles. If we understand peace as inclusive and dialogical, then the disentangled nature of sites, agents, narratives and events in South Africa is hardly promising. And while such fragmentation of the mnemonic landscape might be expected to lead to a nuanced engagement with the meaning of peace in a mnemonically divided society, dichotomous representations of South African histories continue to dominate. As a result, we can observe the emergence of a plurality of parallel peace(s), each internally homogenous but limited in its entanglement with other views of history beyond its own. The acknowledgement of what colonial violence has meant, and continues to mean, for its victims is therefore limited in nature, and the dignity of those victimised by the colonial system is continuously jeopardised.

This does not mean that all is doom and gloom, however. There are certainly mnemonic elements that aim to promote inclusiveness and dialogue as well as an in-depth engagement with colonial legacies. In terms of sites, Freedom Park is an example in which the curators attempt to script an inclusive history that restores dignity to the victims of colonialism. It is therefore surprising that it does not receive higher numbers of visitors, as the colonial Voortrekker Monument does. Similarly, the introduction of new national holidays or attempts to decolonise educational structures have pointed in a similar direction. They were meant to present a way of signalling, at least to a degree, a new beginning for a history ridden with inequalities and violence. However, it remains to be seen to what extent such processes will be able to achieve a more substantial transformation, in terms of stirring a discussion across different sectors of society. Certainly, the transformation of the mnemonic landscape is a dynamic process in which the power balance keeps shifting, and the fact that issues of injustice and marginalisation are being raised publicly is a promising first step. For instance, we could argue that the mnemonic marking of the suffering of South Africa’s indigenous people, through the activities around the legacies of Krotoa for example, is a first step of acknowledgement towards granting this community more political, social and economic rights. We can also see a higher degree of representation of indigenous heritage in museum collections now (see Bredekamp, 2006). This trend is no guarantee of a real, political transformation, as there is still a risk of such marginalised histories being romanticised or used instrumentally for political gain. However, as we have seen with the #RhodesMustFall campaign, bringing contested issues into the public sphere does have the potential to gain societal traction that can transcend local and even national borders. From the perspectives of the victims of colonialism – to this day – the restoration of their dignity through the acknowledgement of on-going structural injustices is an important step towards dealing with a legacy of violence. The next step will be to raise questions around how such injustices can be politically and economically compensated for, in terms of making peace meaningful to those who have been silenced for so long. Peace, understood in mnemonic terms, thus has to signify more than a simplified version of society, shaped by binary views on the past. Instead, it has to actively undo mnemonic silences, disentanglements and amnesias on the one hand, and deal with material transformation on the other hand. Understanding the different layers of fragmentation and stratification in the memory landscape is a first step towards understanding the multidimensional nature of victimhood, the injustices of representation particularly for the poorest and less politically represented sectors of the population, as well as the need to talk about, and act on, questions of reparation and restitution as crucial factors for the restoration of mnemonic dignity.

Conclusions

As this chapter has shown, and as in our other case studies, South African contemporary political structures must not be viewed in isolation from a past in which society was starkly divided between the colonial power and those who were its victims. The continuity of such structures translates into a political system in which not only memories of the past but also visions of the future are starkly divided. Breaking up this century-old discursive pattern poses a considerable challenge to those who seek to transform it. However, with emerging discussions about land reform or other mechanisms of restitution in the higher education sector, there are encouraging signs that such engrained patterns are gradually being broken down. It remains to be seen to what extent such debates will translate into material redistribution and a more formal acknowledgement of the violence of the past – not only by powerful actors within South Africa, but also, importantly, by the former colonial powers in Europe. For a social peace that is inclusive of all races, as well as one in which those who are currently marginalised may find a political stake, this will be a difficult but necessary step, signalling a true commitment to peace in South Africa and beyond.