A partial remembering of The Arch ahead of his first heavenly birthday

The current context of memorialisation in the new South Africa (post-1994) has to a large extent been defined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of which our dear Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the chair. It was legislated into existence by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995.

It finished its work and handed over its report three years later to almost as much criticism as there was praise. As happened with the truth commissions that came into being in other countries such as Burundi, Kenya, Chile and Argentina in periods of post-conflict, memorialisation has been among the processes identified as being part of symbolic reparations. It was linked to truth-telling discourses, and it affirmed people’s right to personal and collective remembering, as well as to mourn and memorialise.

In South Africa, it was an acknowledgement that the omissions and erasures of the past, as by-products of colonialism, slavery and apartheid, were among the range of injustices meted out to the country’s black people.

In 1997, at the opening of SA’s first post-apartheid National Heritage Site — Robben Island — the late president Nelson Mandela appealed for a more inclusive approach to cultural heritage and memorialisation, reminding the country that these could not stand apart from the promises made in the new Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He emphasised that such an approach would “strengthen our attachment to human rights, mutual respect and democracy, and help prevent these ever again being violated”.

There has been much critique of the state’s ability and progress on the level of inclusive and participatory memorialisation as part of strengthening the much sought-after and elusive social cohesion.

The memorial practices inherited from colonial and apartheid SA were exclusive, alienating and largely based on a mode of representation which was Western and colonial. Even though post-1994 the sector had been tasked with new ways of looking at the past, it followed the “great men of history” approach that has long been critiqued in South Africa.

In the 1970s, a movement known as the History Workshop based at Wits University in Johannesburg was among the entities that started looking at a more inclusive way of understanding history and did great work in shifting the centre of history-telling from being the exclusive domain of the academy.

In addition to new methodologies, it also changed the focus of historical content creation to concentrate on documenting the unknown stories of people who were part of historic events but who were not the known or iconic names. This approach has persisted, but mostly in the non-governmental sector.