Younge Gavin / University of Cape Town

Dead Monuments

In 2005, and after a nine-year long consultative process, ANC-aligned protagonists inaugurated a new museum commemorating the liberationist contributions of several activists associated with the Eastern Cape: Nelson Mandela, Raymond Mhlaba and Govan Mbeki among them. This museum, the Red Location Museum, is situated in Port Elizabeth’s oldest black township, New Brighton, and is recognized as a site of national struggle. In 2006, the museum received the Royal Institute of British Architect’s Lubetkin Prize, not only for its innovative design, but also for its political coherence.
Despite the prominence, both nationally and internationally, of this anti-apartheid institution, local residents have forced the closure of the entire museum complex. A community leader reportedly said, ‘why build a house for dead people when us, the living, do not have a roof over our heads?’
Fifteen months later, a monument to liberation from racist apartheid policies remains closed, under threat of extreme physical violence.
Why? This paper, built on first-hand interviews with The Aggrieved Residents’ Steering Committee and ANC Ward Councillors, offers this answer: the ANC’s former grassroots policies of boycott and ‘capture’ have solidified into an un-curated, sporadic, uncontrolled and unspecifiable revolt. It has a name—service delivery protest. Reportedly, these protests have increased during President Zuma’s administration.

Schmahmann Brenda / University of Johannesburg

A Thinking Stone and Two Pink Presidents: Negotiating Afrikaner Nationalist monuments at the University of the Free State

A dilemma confronting many public institutions in South Africa is what to do with monuments they possess that were commissioned in response to the influence of ideologies that are out of favour. In this paper I explore this question by examining how the University of the Free State has negotiated monuments on its campus that attest to the long-standing influence of Afrikaner nationalism on the institution – namely, prominently placed sculptures representing Marthinus Steyn, sixth president of the Orange Free State, and C.R. Swart, first president of the Republic of South Africa, as well as a memorial commemorating the centenary of the Great Trek. Rather than, for example, removing the three monuments, the university decided to commission additional works for campus which convey different messages to them. Key amongst these is Willem Boshoff’s Thinking Stone – a work that undermines the authority of the existent monuments by offering an alternative narrative about South African history, subverting tropes associated with Afrikaner nationalism and assuming a physical form which is accessible and promotes dialogue. The university has also welcomed discursive engagements with the monuments through their temporary adjustment. Such interventions include Plastic Histories in which Cigdem Aydemir, through shrink-wrapping and spraying pink the sculptures of Steyn and Swart, “queered” these monuments, prompting critical thought about the people they venerate and exclude.

Gurney Kim / African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town; Research Centre, Visual Identities in Art and Design, University of Johannesburg

The Disappeared: Missing Artworks Task Force

This paper tracks recent contemporary South African artworks that have ‘disappeared’ from the public domain, and artistic strategies around the ephemeral, to suggest how dead monuments may become living memorials in a register different from their original intention. It will focus upon the potential of the ephemeral, transient and nomadic over the concrete, permanent and spectacular to speak to contemporary social imaginaries.
The author will draw upon a case study ‘New Imaginaries’, an ephemeral art project that explored public space in Johannesburg, to set conceptual ground. She will then offer recent artistic responses to public ‘disappearances': these range from a graffiti intervention that restored the names of Treason Triallists (including Nelson Mandela) from a Johannesburg memorial, which crime had eroded, to a sculpture of a former Zulu king that was removed in Durban and its animal counterparts rearranged into a village diorama, to an artist who gifted thieves the plinth upon which her sculpture should stand as a lesson in art appreciation. Sometimes, disappearance is a deliberate part of artistic practice: an invisible sculpture acts as cellphone jamming device in a gallery, or the Museum of Non Permanence comprises performances that cannot be archived. It may also comprise a spontaneous act of public defiance.
In short, this paper shows the monumental has a spectral dimension of mobile meaning that artists may leverage through ‘rituals of inversion’.

Ezeh Peter-Jazzy / University of Nigeria, Nsukka

Fear of Monuments, Cultural Hegemony and Loss of Collective Memory

I argue that monuments or memorials are vital in non-literate societies, or those to whom literacy is nascent, because they form part of the unwritten narratives that preserve public memory. Loss of a monument in a society with no or a nascent literacy, is the equivalent of burning down a library in societies with an established literary history. While there is evidence, both archaeological and via oral tradition, to show that this is the case with traditional societies in Nigeria, these repositories of public memory have come under attack from both extraneous mercantile and sectarian interests. Traffickers desecrate memorials and market any small or movable items in other countries. Similarly, charismatic preachers demonize these objects and instil fear in local communities. This results in a distortion of the cultural semantics of the sites and objects, and consequently the memory they embody. Between 2004 and 2012, I visited five sites in communities in south-eastern Nigeria where traditional sacred sites had been pillaged. I supplemented those observations with reports from witnesses from other sites. Sectarian hostility to these monuments was more intense, sustained, and extensive. In a number of cases, sectarian violation of these sites has led to violent clashes between traditionalist local groups and their antagonists. Destruction of monuments distorts group memory in communities with no or nascent literacy and, by extension, the story of our common humanity.

Apotsos Michelle / Williams College, USA

African Architecture in the Age of Terror

In March of 2012, the West African nation of Mali experienced a military coup that deposed then-president Amadou Toumani Toure and opened the door for a coalition of Tuareg Islamic militants known as Ansar Dine to seize control of the northern parts of the country. After imposing a highly conservative form of Islamic governance known as Shari ‘a law on the region, Ansar Dine proceeded to perpetrate numerous violent and devastating acts upon the architectural landscape in and around Timbuktu in the name of eradicating idolatrous Qadiri Sufi practices that had been dominant in the area since the fifteenth century.
Yet the specific nature of the sites selected for destruction and the performative, almost ritualistic, quality of the subsequent processes of erasure suggest that the acts of Ansar Dine were much more multifaceted than the mere establishment of an Islamic state. This paper will explore additional motivations behind Ansar Dine’s iconoclastic acts in Timbuktu that move beyond the community’s identity as a site of Sufi power and scholarship and address its increasingly dominant contemporary reality as a world heritage site and tourist attraction.
In doing so, it will consider the problematic relationships that this new career has created within the community, and reframe Ansar Dine’s targeted architectural assaults as a mode of creating traumatic statements aimed at addressing this present state of affairs.