If we forget our history and where we have come from, we are fated to repeat it

All living things have memory. Memory serves as a conveyor belt ferrying knowledge from the past to the present. We avoid mistakes of the past by preserving our learnings, and strive to do better through accumulated knowledge, innovation, determination and vision.

Forgetting accumulated knowledge weakens current capacity to scale new heights in human development. Optimism about the future accompanied by judiciousness is an essential ingredient and acts as a catalyst in the social development process. 

So, what we do today as a country must be informed by memory, else we stumble and perish in a failed state. If what is said about the prudence of remembering the past is true, then references to the past must not be denigrated as an unhealthy fixation that has no value in charting the future, as many are wont to say. 

Opposition to memory is often displayed by those who seek to conceal knowledge about their direct or indirect inheritance of social status and its associated benefits. Denigration of memory of the bitter past endured by fellow citizens is a form of denialism that is also designed to manufacture “alternative facts”. Anti-memory advocacy is hypocritical, specious and counterintuitive, as evidenced by the ubiquity of monuments and memorials all over the world, including here in South Africa.

In reality, those who counsel the victims of historic oppression to erase their memories are the same people who denounced the destruction of colonial and apartheid monuments during the #RhodesMustFall student protests at South African universities (similar protests took place in the UK and US). Consistency in their argument would be to welcome the destruction. In short, colonial and apartheid symbols are sacrosanct, worthy of eternal celebration.

Bizarrely, the victims do not deserve memories of their own. In his “They Are Burning Memory” essay, Njabulo Ndebele meticulously dissects the throbbing undercurrents that lie precariously under the surface and if scoffed at will erupt periodically.

Read in Daily Maverick: “Flight or fight? The quandary students face — retreat abroad or actively defend our hard-won democracy”

I have no doubt that these assertions will draw the fury of the anti-memory fire brigade defenders whose fidelity to the inheritance is predictable. The above reflections are instigated by the vehement opposition expressed by some in our society whenever reference is made to the historic debilitations that haunt the present.

Prudence dictates that protestations about the past not be allowed to deter the achievement of general welfare; in essence, they are wilful diversions that provide no effective solution except to ensure the preservation of parochial interests. Of course, in a democracy, conversation and debate must take place, for that allows for the vetting of ideas, and the opportunity to imagine new possibilities.

That the majority of people in South Africa experienced oppression and suffered severely under apartheid is an objective and incontestable fact; it is by no means a figment of the imagination. Furthermore, let’s remember that genes that carry the identity of our species are transmitted from generation to generation and that is memory; and so, cultural and social capital are transmitted similarly from generation to generation (other things being equal).

What must be consciously avoided is the singular fixation on the horrific past without simultaneously being motivated or seized by vistas of a just, wholesome future. It should therefore follow that the future (beginning now) must be the negation of all the ills that characterised the past.

It bears remembering that memory dates back to time immemorial, it is multifaceted and multilayered (personal, familial, historical, social, political, etc). There are museums and monuments that are embodiments of the heritage of societies. Memories are often curated in physical structures, as in museums and monuments, but sometimes they are ideational, as in the collective experiences of a people, especially if the experiences were traumatic.

I will not attempt to undertake a sweeping survey of its inherent complexity. For ease, convenience and economy, I will confine the following brief observations to experiences during my lifespan; that is, my remembrances of moments that seemed immutable but over time could not resist the inexorable surge of the moral universe in its relentless pursuit of justice, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jnr.

Wallaces, Smiths and Kissingers