Walking memories and growing amnesia in the land claims process: Lake St Lucia, South Africa

Abstract

Memory is often constructed around images drawn from landscape. But memory can also be constituted through the process of traversing landscape—as if memory is inscribed in and through people's feet. What happens then, when a landscape changes? What kinds of change inhibit the making of memory by walking the land? The article addresses the above issues and questions by examining how a representative group of land restitution claimants attempted to document the names of residents who were removed from what is now the Greater St Lucia Wetlands Park in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It describes and analyses the process of walking the land to identify sites and how changes to the landscape affected that process. It shows that changes that involved ‘reversion to bush’ had quite different effects on the memory-construction process from those that involved afforestation. And it uses those examples to comment again on the relationships between memory and landscape, and between the intellect and bodily practice.