The politics of memory and memorialization in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

How people understand the past matters, because it can tell us a lot about how they think about the present and future. As Connerton says, “Our experience of the present very largely depends upon our knowledge of the past. We experience our present world in a context which is causally connected with past events and objects” (1998: 2). This point of view focuses not on establishing objective facts about past events but on how present needs shape what people believe and emphasize about the past, and how this affects present beliefs and actions. Narratives rely on metaphors and images about the past, offering general, practical lessons about groups, their motives, opportunities, and dangers; worldviews make sense of the past in ways that can render present action alternatives more or less plausible, exacerbate or lower anxiety, and facilitate or make less likely the peaceful settlement of disputes. From this perspective, the past is fluid in terms of what people emphasize, worry about, commemorate, and celebrate. Popular and scholarly accounts of the past shift as particular details are selectively remembered and forgotten and as the specific lessons that are drawn from past events are selectively emphasized. For example, in South Africa, the focus of this chapter and the next, historian Leslie Witz (2003) argues that Jan van Riebeeck, the founder of the first Dutch settlement at the Cape in 1652 and long a symbol of Afrikaner anti-British pride, was recast more broadly as a white hero during the 300th anniversary celebrations in 1952, four years after the Afrikaner-led Nationalist Party took power in the country.