Apartheid's Festival: Contesting South Africa's National Pasts (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts Loren Kruger Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts By Leslie Witz Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003. pp. ISBN 0-253-34271-6 cloth; 0-253-21613-3 paper. South Africa's first postapartheid decade (1994-2004) has seen competing attempts by educational institutions from schools to museums to neighborhood tour guides to create compelling histories of the present out of the conflicting pasts offered by colonial, neocolonial, apartheid, and resistance narratives. As Leslie Witz demonstrates, these attempts remain uneven as "contesting South Africa's national pasts" continues to be conducted in the streets as well as the halls of academe. In his persuasive account, the transformation of Jan van Riebeeck—from a Dutch East India Company official on temporary assignment at an insignificant African outpost in 1652 to the volksplanter, planter or founder of white South Africa honored, at the tercentenary of his arrival in 1952, not only with a national festival but also with pride of place on the country's currency and the status of original South African in the opening chapters [End Page 182] of history textbooks—acts as a touchstone of the changing stakes involved in writing and rewriting South African history since that initial contact. In this revision, Witz's project complements those of researchers such as Carolyn Hamilton, Shamiel Jeppie, Bhekizizwe Peterson, and Witz's frequent collaborator Ciraj Rassool, who have revised previously firm assumptions about clear-cut opposition between apartheid power and anti-apartheid struggle. Framed by current debates about South Africa's contested pasts and possible futures in the introduction and conclusion, Witz's study shows how different stakeholders created in Van Riebeeck the protagonist or antagonist of their national narrative and the architect of the material basis on which that narrative had been or might be turned into lived reality. From the Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to formal colonial regimes (briefly Dutch and later British) in the nineteenth and early twentieth to the technically if perversely postcolonial polities from the segregated union under the Commonwealth (1910-48) to the state of systematic apartheid (1948-90), to the antisegregation organizations or resistance movements contesting white supremacy in each of its phases, Van Riebeeck played a perhaps surprising leading role. The first chapter examines the tensions among "Van Riebeeck's pasts" from conflicting editions of a diary attributed to him in a series of school texts and other instructional histories that transform him from a transient Dutch official to the forefather, in early English accounts, of the British Cape Colony and on to foundation of a unified white South Africa. The rest of the book charts the planning, execution, and reception of the tercentenary celebrations in Cape Town. Chapters 2 and 3 plot the tensions among the predominantly Afrikaner Nationalist organizers to represent Van Riebeeck as ethnic volksplanter as well as founder of a nation encompassing English- as well as Afrikaans-speaking whites, the skeptical response of less nationalistic white liberals as well as sharp critique from opposition organizations especially the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), while chapter 5 investigates the reactions of hinterland towns through which reconstructed "mail coaches" passed on their way to Cape Town. Chapter 4 focuses on the festival fair, which like its predecessors, the commemoration of the Union in Cape Town 1910 and the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg (the first city outside Britain to play host to the British Empire) in 1936, and elsewhere, such as the 1886 Paris Exposition and the 1893 "white city" of the World Exposition in Chicago, offered an unsettled mixture of exhibitions of "modern" industry as the achievements of the "new" nation, and displays of "primitive" people allegedly left behind by white modernity. While Witz offers an unprecedented study of the Van Riebeeck tercentenary, the conditions that made it possible, and responses to the festival itself and the debates it engendered, he does not fully realize the promise of the introduction, to match this festival against other "journeys, festivals and the making of national pasts." To be sure, the introduction does compare the Van Riebeeck festival with the Columbus Quincentenary in the United States and Founder's...