Post-Apartheid Memorialization in South Africa

Abstract

Public memory and memorialization were a realm of significant change in the aftermath of the fall of apartheid in South Africa. Memorialization processes, particularly in the late 1990s and first decade of the 2000s, were closely linked with constructions of new national identities, narratives, and meanings. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission process of the late 1990s was particularly crucial in bringing suppressed narratives of memory and trauma to light, and strongly influenced the production of memory and memorialization in this period. Postapartheid memorialization took several forms, including the funding and construction of large-scale national projects for new museums and heritage sites. In some instances, these state-led projects were enfolded with ambitions of urban remaking, or were positioned as drivers of social and economic development. At the same time, the postapartheid period saw a burgeoning of smaller, community-driven projects of memory that tended to make use of more open-ended narratives and methodologies to engage the complexities of memory, particularly around instances of forced removals and collective traumas within communities. While the construction of new museums and memorials were crucial to postapartheid memorialization processes, there has also been a strong drive to transform and reformulate existing museums and places of memory. These processes include the establishment of the Southern and Northern Flagship Institutions, which restructured the functioning of national museums and their approaches. Sites closely linked with histories of Afrikaner Nationalism have, in some instances, attempted to present reconfigured narratives focusing on cultural presence rather than nationalist politics, while many smaller museums have struggled to develop more inclusive and reflective approaches. In the first decades of the 21st century, the persistence of heroic and monumental forms of memory-making and of colonial memorials has been called into question via the Rhodes Must Fall movement and ongoing calls for a more radical remaking of public memory.