Popular history; Cultural memory

Abstract

History's critics, be it admitted, have far more to say than that suggested by Claudia Braude in cynical lead-line to her review of Negotiating Past: academics and artists have discovered memory market, a thriving area in United States and elsewhere (Johannesburg Mail and Guardian, 3-8 April, 1998:26). History as a form of popular discourse and culturally encoded group memory has usurped academic historiography because of particular conditions of production and mobilisation of knowledge of past in our divided, hybrid country, not because of derivative dominance of American intellectual trends. And so it seems that those well-intentioned radical curriculum reformers of early nineteen nineties were wasting their time--no one's going to be teaching it anyway--worrying over whether Shaka Zulu was a real life black Napoleon or a monstrous myth concocted by white missionaries and settlers as a cover for their slaving and colonial expropriation (see Hamilton 1995). The popular history and cultural memory pertinent to Zulu nationalism simply requires a Napoleonic Shaka, just as Basotho mythic charter of King Moshoeshoe I as benevolent civiliser requires real live cannibals in contemporaneous, early-19th century Lesotho (Coplan 1994:1-3). Indeed, as befits symbolisation of pre-colonial relations between these two nascent nationalities, converse heroic myths require each other, so that Basotho cultural memory has considered Shaka responsible for appearance of cannibalism in their region (Lagden 1909:46). As I hinted in my own lead line, this foregrounding of public and popular history is neither surprising nor anomalous. A host of issues of teal moment: land claims, occupancy and powers of chieftaincy, public sacralisation of historical sites, Truth and Reconciliation, restitution for injury and suffering under apartheid, building and re-building of popular identities, African Renaissance--what Graham Pechey (1993:155) calls the need for a dialogue of irreducible pluralities of imagined communities--and interbraided re-collection and comprehension of individual and collective experience; all require centering of arts and sciences of memory and testimony, of self-recognition and representation in popular genres. Without attempting air-tight categorisation (popular culture needs air), we can identify popular culture as those genres that, as Fabian insists, (1978:315) did not come about merely as responses to questions and conditions; but that ask questions and create conditions. More specific to contemporary Africa, Barber argues (1997:1-2) that popular genres do not so much hybridize static dichotomies of traditional and modern, indigenous and Western, local and global as destabilize and consume those stereotypical categories and their opposition altogether. It is these dynamic, anything goes (together) contemporary forms that engage self-expressive creativity of vast majority of people in Africa today, and that shatter common misconception that there is somewhere in West a cultural capital of global. Indeed, while majority of South Africa's dispossessed still look to modernism, not post-modernism, for a post-apartheid social narrative (Pechey 1993: 156), it is in such people's own popular genres that totalizing concepts and self-concepts of culture are disputed and falsified in intuitive experience. As Michael Chapman, who has worked to centre study of language auriture in literary studies at University of Natal argues: Our differentiated modernity, our hybrid condition should ensure that we resist splitting our story into that of Africa and West. Because of our fractured history we are under an obligation--as West no longer thinks it is--to identify potential of shared storytelling in which compelling power' of story defines us as human beings. …