Moving Monuments

Abstract

The shifting relationship between physical monuments and the public memory that they seek to construct is explored through a photographic and textual examination of the social and political forces behind the construction and subsequent relocation of the Irish Brigade Monument in South Africa. Unveiled in 1975 in Johannesburg, the monument celebrated the memory of the Irish Brigade: “physical force” Irish nationalists who fought on the side of the Boers against the British in the South African War (1899–1902) in what has been celebrated as an early act of anti-imperialist solidarity. The design of the monument and its location on the west of Johannesburg represents a crisis in both the strategy of memorialization and a particular moment within Afrikaner nationalism. In 2001 part of the monument was unilaterally relocated to the white-separatist settlement of Orania by a grouping of white right-wingers in order to save it from demolition. Against the background of the 2015 #RhodesMustFall protests by black students in South Africa directed against the public symbols of previous regimes, this essay argues the Irish Brigade Memorial was the product of a strategic alignment between Irish settler nationalism and Afrikaner nationalism in response to the success of the international campaign to isolate the apartheid regime in the 1970s. The subsequent history of the monument, and its relocation to Orania in 2001, reflects the changing balance of forces within Afrikaner politics and the emergence of a modernist separatist tendency within that politics.