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Textual Memories: Autobiographical Writing in a Time of Uncertainty

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

The birth of the ‘new South Africa’ has brought with it a proliferation of commentaries and essays, autobiographies, memoirs, and personal reminiscences, and realist documentaries that explore the ... More

The birth of the ‘new South Africa’ has brought with it a proliferation of commentaries and essays, autobiographies, memoirs, and personal reminiscences, and realist documentaries that explore the quandaries of social institutions and individuals as they attempt to deal honestly and forthrightly with the multiple legacies of tyranny, repression, and rebellion. Individual memories only become meaningful when they become social, that is, when they are shared and cross over into the realm of collective-cultural remembrance. As a kind of first-person narrative convention, these forms of written expression have entered into public discourses as factually-based stories, or mementos, that reflect their particular times and places in history. Autobiographical writing in the aftermath of historical trauma is a cultural manifestation of the personal need to rid oneself of the burden of history, or a kind of therapeutic undertaking designed to reconcile oneself with the past.Less

Facing Backward, Looking Forward: The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

With the collapse of white minority rule and the dismantling of apartheid, citizens of the ‘new South Africa’ are called upon to look two ways in time: back to the racially-divided past to confront ... More

With the collapse of white minority rule and the dismantling of apartheid, citizens of the ‘new South Africa’ are called upon to look two ways in time: back to the racially-divided past to confront painful memories born of discrimination and oppression, and forward to the future – with its attendant risks, uncertainties, and contingent possibilities. Looking backward, they hold onto the past by remembering and commemorating. Looking forward, they envision a radiant future unencumbered and unburdened by the sordid apartheid past. The central conundrum that arises from this Janus-faced, schizophrenic vision has to do with resolving the tension between the politics of remembering and the politics of forgetting. On the one hand, the collapse of apartheid has triggered an enthusiasm for the recovery of those aspects of the national past which white minority rule had tried to erase, suppress, and elide from collective memory. On the other hand, finding a common ground of shared values upon which to forge a unifying national identity requires moving beyond – escaping – the past that had divided the country along racial and ethnic, ‘tribal’ and linguistic lines.Less

Haunted Heritage: Visual Display at District Six and Robben Island

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

“Haunting” is a useful metaphorical device for calling attention to how it is that certain places instill a sense of possession, absence, and loss in the urban landscape. The sense of the spectral ... More

“Haunting” is a useful metaphorical device for calling attention to how it is that certain places instill a sense of possession, absence, and loss in the urban landscape. The sense of the spectral presence of those who are not physically there is a ubiquitous feature of the phenomenology of place. This chapter uses the examples of the District Six Museum (Cape Town) and Robben Island Museum to explore how the spectral presence of the past haunts the present.Less

White Lies: Mythmaking and Social Memory in the Service of White Minority Rule

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

This chapter addresses a range of questions that investigate the origins of memory-making under white minority rule and how these discredited mnemonic devices linger in the present. What becomes of ... More

This chapter addresses a range of questions that investigate the origins of memory-making under white minority rule and how these discredited mnemonic devices linger in the present. What becomes of social memories of settler colonialism and white minority rule when the myth-laden, socio-cultural world of their making lies in ruins? The end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy triggered what amounted to a crisis of collective memory that left citizens of the ‘new South Africa’ without the stable reference points necessary for building a shared sense of national identity. What should be remembered and how? Where do old-fashioned monuments and memorials that extolled the virtues of white minority rule fit into the new national narrative of political stability, economic progress, and racial reconciliation? These are the kinds of questions that immediately provoked widespread debate and controversy.Less

Collective Memory in Place: The Voortrekker Monument and the Hector Pieterson Memorial

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

Focusing particular attention on two sites of memory – the Voortrekker Monument and the Hector Pieterson Memorial – enables us to critically examine both the parallels and divergent trajectories in ... More

Focusing particular attention on two sites of memory – the Voortrekker Monument and the Hector Pieterson Memorial – enables us to critically examine both the parallels and divergent trajectories in these different modes of commemoration. The Voortrekker Monument marked the power of Afrikanerdom at the height of the political confidence in the National Party as the vehicle of (white) national identity. Once a messenger of power, it has become a symbol of the failed promise of white minority rule. Once a powerful marker of triumph, it has become symbol of hubris. In contrast, the Hector Pieterson Memorial is an exemplary expression of what Maria Tumarkin has called a traumascape, or a distinctive category of place that stands witness to terrible acts of tragedy, and as a result inadvertently becomes synonymous with the past events themselves. Much more than merely the physical setting for tragedy, traumascapes are cathartic locations, transformed psychically by suffering, grief, and loss. They have become essential parts of people’s experience of mourning, remembering, and making sense of the traumatic events that took place there.Less

Makeshift Memorials: Marking Time with Vernacular Remembrance

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

The vernacular and monumental are intertwined at sites of collective memory, and ambiguity and fluidity mark the boundaries that separate them both analytically and symbolically. While there are ... More

The vernacular and monumental are intertwined at sites of collective memory, and ambiguity and fluidity mark the boundaries that separate them both analytically and symbolically. While there are clear similarities in the way they commemorate past events, the distinction between the two modes of remembrance remains significant. Put in general terms, vernacular, commonplace, and everyday modes of remembrance refer to those social practices of memorialization that are created outside of official or institutionalized sanction. Since commemorative sites are places where “memory crystallizes and secretes itself” as the material manifestations of social consciousness, unsanctioned vernacular performances of shared mourning are useful guides to understanding the ways that local communities choose to remember their pasts. These modes of remembrance provide evidence of a felt-need for “bottom-up” avenues through which to express grief at loss, and they reflect efforts to reclaim, or at least more properly represent, the distinctiveness of the persons mourned and the events remembered. In the broadest sense, communities of mourners – in looking for ways to express shared sorrow – make use of material objects to remind themselves of what happened in the past and to re-orient themselves to the present.Less

Epilogue: History and Heritage

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

This concluding chapter investigates the tension between history and heritage – what one scholar referred to as “twins separated at birth”: while their origins are identical, the trajectories of ... More

This concluding chapter investigates the tension between history and heritage – what one scholar referred to as “twins separated at birth”: while their origins are identical, the trajectories of their distinct life-courses are quite dissimilar. As communicative devices, history and heritage rely on antithetical modes of persuasion. Whereas history proclaims its commitment to unvarnished truth and objectivity, heritage is highly selective, arbitrary, and subjective. Heritage does not pretend to present a genuinely authentic, and reasonably plausible, account of some past, but is a declaration of faith in that what came before. With the end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy, the new custodians of memory sought to undo and unmake the falsified monumental history of the racially-coded past and to elevate popular resistance to white domination as the new national narrative. Yet in the ‘new South Africa’, sites of memory have to compete with the rejuvenated tourist industry. Tourism is not just a commercial business, but also a social practice engaged with the framing of history and identity.Less

Introduction: Memory and Amnesia after Apartheid

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

The Introduction contextualizes apartheid, while discussing the making and meaning of collective memory.

The Power of Collective Memory

Martin J. Murray

in Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

In this chapter, I investigate how commemorative practices have always been deeply invested in the shaping of political and national identities, and the recasting of new memory-markers provides us ... More

In this chapter, I investigate how commemorative practices have always been deeply invested in the shaping of political and national identities, and the recasting of new memory-markers provides us with significant clues as to the social stability of the ‘new South Africa’ after the end of apartheid and about the ways that the custodians of memory – both from the top down and from the bottom up – project its future. A close reading of the memorial landscapes that proliferated after the end of apartheid can reveal insights into the power of collective memory to shape national identity. Looking at the cultural politics of ‘nation-building’ through the lens of an assortment of mnemonic devices – such as monuments and memorials, museums, and autobiographical writing – enables us to grasp how the lingering, ghostly presence of the past, always contested and never stable, haunts the present. While the ‘new South Africa’ is located in the historical conjuncture that has been called “post-apartheid,” it must be recognized that the legacies and impositions of white minority rule are far from over, and that they have remained embedded and intertwined with, and imprinted upon, the here-and-now.Less