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The Legacy of a Troubled Past — Commemorative Politics in South Africa in the 21st Century. Bernard Cros, Mathilde Rogez, Gilles Teulié (eds.). Aix-en-Provence : Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2021, 208 p.

Tina Harpin
Bibliographical reference

The Legacy of a Troubled Past — Commemorative Politics in South Africa in the 21st Century. Bernard Cros, Mathilde Rogez, Gilles Teulié (eds.). Aix-en-Provence : Presses Universitaires de Provence, ISBN 9791032003497, 208 p.

Editor's notes

Index nominum
Brett Bailey, Gary Baines, Chokri Ben Chikha, Steve Biko, Justin Cartwright, Paul Coquerel, Bernard Cros, Philippe Denis, Rehad Desai, M. K. Gandhi, Shannen Hill, Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, Aryan Kaganof, Antjie Krog, Annael Le Poullennec, Julius Malema, Nelson Mandela, Sabine Marschall, Chumani Maxwele, Khanyisile Mbongwa, Fiona McCann, Zayd Minti, Brett Murray, Cécile Perrot, Piet Retief, Cecil J. Rhodes, Fanny Robles, Mathilde Rogez, Brenda Schmahmann, Usha Seejarim, Gilles Teulié, Stencils Tokolos, Donovan Ward

Full text

1In the wake of its first free elections in 1994, South Africa appeared to the local and international audience as a model of society on the verge of successfully dealing with its traumatic history and internal conflicts thanks to the so-called “restorative justice” promoted in order to defend national unity. The charismatic figure of Nelson Mandela and the public hearings and reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) reinforced (at least to the outside) the myth of a peacefully shared post-apartheid memory. The collection The Legacy of a Troubled Past, Commemorative Politics in South Africa in the 21st century edited by Bernard Cros, Mathilde Rogez and Gilles Teulié prove the reality more complex. Dedicated to the late scholar Sabine Marschall, the volume brings together eminent France-based and South Africa-based specialists of memory studies, heritage studies, and South African art, politics and culture. They help to understand what happened since 1994 and try to answer the genuine question: “has South Africa finally reached the end of the transition period from a traumatic past?” (10).

2In their thorough introduction, besides listing key memorial and political unrests of the past two decades in South Africa, Cros, Rogez and Teulié offer a state-of-the-art literature review that delves into the notions of “remembering/re-membering”, “collective memory” and “postmemory”. They also foreground the multiplicity and the subjectivity of individual and collective recollections and assert that memory is “about choice and it is about the power of groups who are able to enforce a dominant reading of history in a competitive memory market” (10). They notably remark that “the African National Congress (ANC) has been regularly recycling memories of the apartheid past for political gain” (ibid.).

3The first section, “The struggle, Past and Present: The Memorialisation of Violence” starts with Sabine Marschall’s essay on what she chooses to call “heritage vandalism”. She undercuts the view that willful damage to monuments is only ideologically motivated and she insists for example on “tactical vandalism” aimed at “creating jobs (security guard, clean-up, maintenance)” (33) or on “accidental damage” (caused for instance by homeless shelters), the latter being “one of the most important sources of damage” according to her (34). This assessment seems nonetheless to question the choice of the term “vandalism”, which could have been used more aptly at least with quotation marks. Likewise, the lack of quantitative and qualitative data and the porous classification chosen to describe “vandalism” tend to weaken the demonstration.

4Fanny Robles’ subsequent chapter about “(in)appropriate ways to remember racial oppression” in the artistic domain is also concerned with violence and transgression. She details the different stagings of “Exhibit A” (2010-2012) and “Exhibit B” (2012-2016)” by Brett Bailey, considered a leading figure in South African and worldwide theater. Interestingly, his tableaux vivants were mostly exposed in Europe, depended on European funding, and aimed at “remembering the colonial European oppression of Africans and its postcolonial continuation” (46). In 2012, the anti-racist group Bühnenwatch condemned “Exhibit B” as sensationalist and as lacking of any “analysis of sources and mechanisms of racism” (51). A growing criticism fueled by the hashtag #BoycottExhibitB led to the cancellation of the show in London, and (partially) in Seine-Saint-Denis in 2014, but Robles leaves the reader eager for more information on the arguments raised against “Exhibit B” in France. This stimulating essay avoids presenting Bailey’s intention to reverse the Victorian ethnological shows as “misunderstood”, and it demonstrates how it was seriously ethically questioned, including by other artists, such as Chokri Ben Chikha.

5Annael Le Poullennec refocuses attention on the memorialization of violence in artistic productions “made in” South Africa, primarily meant for a South African audience, about South African history. She tackles how the Marikana massacre is “re-membered” in two films, Miners Shot Down by Rehad Desai (2014), Threnody for the Victims of Marikana by Aryan Kaganof (2014) and two collective creations, Khanyisile Mbongwa’s performance Rotting Treasures (2013) and work by graffiti collective Tokolos Stencils (2013-2014). Her close analysis of each of these art works revitalizes our understanding of power dynamics intrinsic to commemorative politics since she observes that “the government is both involved in the violence committed by the police and in the position to enable the memorialisation of chosen events” (67). She explains that “Marikana” was an historical turning point because it undercut the “validity of post-apartheid narratives of transformation in South Africa, and catalyzed anguish about memory-making” (68). which is why the “power to story and counter-story” is crucial (69). Desai’s film was used by workers as a political tool to break down disinformation. Mbongwa performed mourning in Central Cape Town to raise consciousness. Kaganof’s film also strives to spread the call to “remember Marikana” by a subtle play on dismembering and deconstruction. Illegally but with good reasons, the Tokolos memorialized Marikana in public space through the “Mambush stencil and Remember Marikana injunction, spray-painted all over South African walls” (77).

6This wide range of artistic practices aiming to save memory from oblivion and manipulation is commented on further in the second section of the book, “The Ambiguous Memorialisation of Heroes.” Brenda Schmahmann’s contribution is richly illustrated and sheds light on Johannesburg-based artist Usha Seejarim’s commemorations of Mahatma Gandhi (in 2006) and Nelson Mandela (in 2013). Seejarim’s rejection of conventional monument and interest in random domestic objects are unmistakable in the Mohandas Gandhi Memorial. A part of the Sunday Times Heritage Project, it stands outside the Hamide Mosque in Fordsburg, and is constituted by a metal cauldron (a potjie in afrikaans) manufactured to function as a zoetrope. The original cauldron in ceramic was smashed twice probably because the Sunday Times had reprinted the cartoons depicting Mohammed, originally published in the Danish journal Jyllands-Posten. Mandela’s funerary portrait, achieved despite multiple constraints, is also presented as a perfect “countermonument’ (101).

7Mélanie Joseph-Vilain’s chapter examines the ambivalent “textual commemoration” of another major South African figure, Piet Retief, in Up Against the Night (2015) by Justin Cartwright. This postmodern novel based on extensive historical research revisits the political myth which is at the core of Afrikaner identity: the Great Trek and the murder of Piet Retief and his followers (which led to the famous battle of Blood River). Quoting Paul Coquerel, Joseph-Vilain reminds us that “the blood shed by the Boers becomes the vector through which they are rooted in African soil” (107). This is why the narrator Frank is “rather obsessed with his ancestor” Piet Retief and curious about the monuments dedicated to him. Joseph-Vilain underscores that the “reflection on the link between history, place and identity is achieved through generic hybridity” in this multifaceted novel (109).

8Shannen Hill’s richly illustrated chapter follows up on Joseph-Vilain’s analysis of the ambiguous memorialization of heroes through illuminating insights into the persistence of Black consciousness’ principles in today’s South African art and politics. After making it clear that Steve Biko’s critique of capitalism has been underestimated, she presents examples of artivism inspired by Biko’s ideas and past action. The public art intervention “Returning the Gaze” organized by Zayd Minti, founder of the Black Arts Collective (BLAC) in Cape Town in 2000 was a unique occasion to denounce the inequalities still vivid in this city, as proves “Leisure Time” a provocative billboard installed in Langa by Donovan Ward. Brett Murray, also involved in the BLAC, commemorated Biko in his art exhibition Hail to the Thief II in 2012, but because of the uproar provoked by his painting “The Spear” which portrays Jacob Zuma with his genitalia exposed, this tribute was missed. Hill analyses the mixed media work “Killed Twice” to bring back Murray’s message to the surface: it “is about the ANC’s selling out of socialist methods” against poverty (124). She concludes her essay by contextualizing the Rhodes Must Fall Campaign and “Fallism” – she never uses the word “vandalism”. According to her, the “Fallists” are Biko’s legitimate heirs whereas the ANC only “borrows Biko” for its own benefits.

9The volume’s closing section, “Learning and Unlearning: Memories and/for the Future” includes three chapters, very different in their object and approach. Fiona McCann builds a fascinating overview of the questions raised by the autobiographical writings of one of the most well-known contemporary Afrikaner poet, essayist and novelist: Antjie Krog. Country of My Skull (1998), A Change of Tongue (2003), Begging to be Black (2010) and Conditional Tense (2013) are “a form of autoethnography” (143) which foreground Krog’s “own willingness to be dispossessed (relationally) and a meaningful discussion on the legacies of material dispossession from colonial times right through to the present” (144). Though she doesn’t use the expression “generic hybridity” as Joseph-Vilain does, McCann evokes a “very generic instability” typical of an “‘(…) epistemology of truth, lies and confession’ as shaped by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (154) and she praises Krog for opening new perspectives on commemorative politics.

10In the following chapter, Philippe Denis also deals with collective and personal remembrance and invites us to turn the gaze upon a marginalized and scattered community: the people living with HIV/AIDS. As the founder and current Board member of the Sinomlando Centre for Oral History and Memory Work in Africa, he quite rightly observes that “there are similarities in the ways South Africa has been dealing with the memories of apartheid and those of HIV/AIDS. Both scourges generated anger, fear and pain. Both have been the object of contestation from the highest levels of the state to the intimacy of family life” (157). Denis describes how “memory facilitators” at the Sinomlando Centre help children and teenagers affected by the disease to reconstruct their life story and their family’s history. This “memory work” enhances resilience. Denis reproduces excerpts of the distressing stories that the youth have been able to put together themselves. He thus delivers an important and hopeful lesson about how traumatic memories can be overcome.

11Cécile Perrot’s contribution brings back to the fore the vexed question of the sometimes violent youth contestation of colonial and apartheid heritage. She rejects the word “vandalism” and considers that the student Chumani Maxwele who threw human excrement at the statue of Cecil J. Rhodes located at the University of Cape Town on 9th March 2015, expressed “rebellion”. She scrutinizes the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements as a meaningful “dialogue with the past, with placards reading, ‘We were sold dreams in 1994, we now want to refund’ or ‘My grandfather was a garden boy, my father is a garden boy and I wanna be a vet” (172). She corroborates Le Poullennec’s analysis by stating that the “powerful narrative of the miracle transition has lost much of its original appeal, especially among the younger generations” (174). She gives examples of their daily reality of racism and discrimination and she usefully retraces the origin of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), as well as Julius Malema’s political rise to power and his attempt to pose as the true heir of the liberation struggle heroes.

12The collection’s last chapter by the historian and specialist of the conflicting memories of South Africa’s ‘border war’ Gary Baines, reaches the conclusion that “the role of memory in promoting reconciliation is ambiguous” (185). Like many other observers, Baines confirms the failure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to build enduring reconciliation. This leads to a paradoxical defense of memory wars, and of their antidote “consensual history” (197). Contestation in the public sphere and the coexistence of competing memories are necessary to strengthen South African democracy and to pave the way for a renewed social contract. In sum, The Legacy of a Troubled Past, Commemorative Politics in South Africa in the 21st century is a highly instructive and uplifting volume. Its vital contribution to the field of memory studies and South African studies should not go unnoticed.

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References

Electronic reference

Tina Harpin, The Legacy of a Troubled Past — Commemorative Politics in South Africa in the 21st Century. Bernard Cros, Mathilde Rogez, Gilles Teulié (eds.). Aix-en-Provence : Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2021, 208 p.”Caliban [Online], 71-72 | 2024, Online since 20 August 2024, connection on 18 May 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/13046; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12dmt

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About the author

Tina Harpin

Université de Guyane

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