Our most enduring monuments are our democracy and our diversity

In the week of the removal of Cecil John Rhodes’s statue from the grounds of the University of Cape Town (UCT), social media was awash with mash-ups and memes that sought to convey the purveyors’ sense of humour. One such image featured President Jacob Zuma resplendent in Zulu regalia, with a shield and a spear, doing a spirited jig on the plinth that had recently been vacated by the late and unlamented Mr Rhodes.

Beneath a caption stating that white people had declared war on the statues of black people, the second picture is of a group of seemingly white, farmer-types in khakis and veldskoene, busy carting off a statue of King Shaka. Even though patently fictitious, certain aspects of these depictions could well point to the confusion roiling in our collective subconscious. There is something incomplete and  tentative in our telling of the story of our country.

Nowhere  is this coyness more glaring than in the symbols in the public domain, the monuments and statues where the past stands stolidly unassailable. There is something permanent and logical about its place in history. No one in his or her right mind, the past maintains, could have the temerity to suggest it be changed or tampered with.  

In November 1998, I was part of a small delegation of journalists and writers invited by the Heinrich Böll Foundation to meet German journalists at a seminar on Media Dealing with the Past, in Berlin. Led by prizewinning author Hugh Lewin, then a member of the Human Rights Violations Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, our group would share insights on issues of reconciliation with our hosts.

I was excited about the trip, knowing that Germany is a country filled with history. I needed to see how society, in a unified country, grappled with reconciling its momentous past with a complicated future. Also informing this need was a self-conscious understanding that I was on the executive of the SABC, in charge of programming, and had been recently made aware that there was a clear line of sight from the 28th floor of the edifice on Radio Park to the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria.  

In his speech, Lewin pointed out that Berlin was was a potent symbol of what was once divided and was now unified and that the fall of the Berlin Wall had played such a crucial part in persuading FW de Klerk to make his fateful speech in February 1990. 

Later, we would visit Weimar and its environs a city that represents the age-old co-existence of good and evil. Fronting the neoclassical German National Theatre are statues of poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and dramatist 
Friedrich Schiller. Famous for their prominent role in the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement of the late 18th century, the two authors would have turned in their  graves had they known that, less than 30 minutes to the north, the Nazis would set up and run the Buchenwald concentration camp. 

As luck would have it, our guide at that camp was a former prisoner who had been jailed by the Nazis for “antisocial” crimes. When quizzed about the nature of these crimes, he retreated behind a shamefaced smile of incomprehension. An ageless, sprightly German, he spoke halting English although I suspected he knew more than he let on.

As he accompanied us he itemised each station of horror – from the grim holding cells, past the watchtower with a clock permanently stopped at 3:15, to the crematoria – without any emotion. This veneer cracked, however, when we entered a chamber piled with shoes and various personal items. This was the last stop where the condemned would take that return-less journey to the gas chambers. For me, however, the most vivid and eloquent testimony to Nazi inhumanity was the small buckle shoes of children.

l'd visit Weimar and its environs – a city that represents the age-old co-existence of good and evil. Fronting the neoclassical German National Theatre are statues of poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and dramatist Friedrich Schiller. Famous for their prominent role in the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement of the late 18th century, the two authors would have turned in their graves had they known that, less than 30 minutes to the north, the Nazis would set up and run the Buchenwald concentration camp. As luck would have it, our guide at that camp was a former prisoner who had been jailed by the Nazis for “antisocial” crimes.

When quizzed about the nature of these crimes, he retreated behind a shame-faced smile of incomprehension. An ageless, sprightly German, he spoke 
halting English although I suspected he knew more than he let on. As he accompanied us he itemised each station of horror – from the grim holding cells, past the watchtower with a clock permanently stopped at 3:15, to the crematoria – without any emotion.

This veneer cracked, however, when we entered a chamber piled with shoes and various personal items. This was the last stop where the condemned would take that returnless journey to the gas chambers. For me, however, the most vivid and eloquent testimony to Nazi inhumanity was the small buckle shoes of children.

This sight immediately brought to mind a book I had read some years ago, Naked Among Wolves, by Bruno Apitz. First published in 1958, it tells the story of prisoners in the camp who risked their lives to hide a young PolishJewish boy called Stefan Cyliak. The boy had grown up and was liberated when the camp fell to the Allies. Our guide then told us that Cyliak, whose main hiding place was a suitcase, had died a few years ago.

At the curio shop, which sold concentration camp memorabilia, I bought an English copy of Bernhard Schlink’s bestseller, The Reader, a book that strives to deal with the taboo subject of a German woman’s confrontation with her Nazi past. There is no denying the truth in the mordant dictum that the future is certain, it is the past that is unpredictable.

In fact, despite all our attempts to forestall this eventuality, the past will turn up like an uninvited guest at the dinner table and shatter genteel conversation to smithereens. But this is the unaddressed past, a past that is treated as a taboo by those who are uncomfortable with its implications, like unacknowledged offspring who suddenly pop up at a family gathering.

The world’s poorest communities, as Judge Albie  Sachs told us during the Design Indaba in 2006, find ways to simultaneously comment on their public spaces while investing them with aesthetic qualities. The murals that bedecked the walls of Mozambican cities – some of which were later painted over by security personnel – were a demonstration of this popular activism. In other words, how to transform a symbol of oppression and suffering into a celebration of the human spirit.

It is my belief that, while the practicalities of today’s (the past’s?) negotiated settlement dictated for appropriation of the savage splendour of the edifices of apartheid’s conquistadors, for instance, the Union Buildings and Parliament, the weight of the memory of the provenance of such structures will, one day, undermine the project of democracy.

One believes that these buildings should have been converted into museums, where the unexorcised spirits of the past could be contained, rather than being unleashed to poison our inexorable march into the future. It was possibly in this spirit that the Constitutional Court transformed the grim and forbidding Old Fort Prison of Johannesburg, which had once held Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.

Mobilising the creative energies of South Africans from all walks of life, the 
guiding spirits behind the establishment of this living museum and an anthem to democracy, effectively banished the negativity and the memory of painful associations and replaced them with a positive symbol of SA’s future.

A similar commemorative treatment has been afforded to another colonial jail, Robben Island, and at the Castle of Good Hope. It is hard not to come to the conclusion that, had artists and various creative  institutions been included in the talks about SA’s future, a  lot of the confusion that attends our discourse on symbols of public representation would have been mitigated. 

I know that the foregoing will elicit howls of protest from our well meaning representatives who, it must be said, did their best to wrest concessions out of the clutches of a brutal regime, which was even more dangerous in its capability to loose violence on an innocent population. Hindsight is 20/20 vision. And I know, moreover, that there exist government agencies seized with the issues of arts, culture and heritage, where monuments are planned.

But I still hold that our public spaces are bereft of certain elements, whose inclusion could have contributed towards our much-vaunted social cohesion. Africa and its historical impact (especially since some of us don’t realise we are an African country) could have had a much more prominent representation. It is not enough, I believe, to only honour Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, Kwame 
Nkrumah or even Kenya’s Nobel laureate, Wangari Maathai, with street names.  

Africans are invisible in the land of their birth; this might come as a surprise to those of us who believe in arithmetic to compute presence, whereas what I have in mind is what James Baldwin calls the algebra of power. You might enjoy numerical superiority in demographic terms, but if you have no effect on the areas where it counts most – namely in the economy and media – and your public presence is reduced to token statues and billboards peddling alcohol and skin lightening creams – you are simply set at nought. 

Perhaps to address this need, I know that my friend Dali Tambo has commissioned statues to honour eminent  people, from colonial times to the present, who have contributed to the southern African struggle. But the struggle was not linear or simply reduced to political activism; it also involved various areas, such as sports and the arts.

There are then plans to include statues of some international figures, from Basil d’Oliveira to Olaf Palme. But this would be a drop in the ocean, given our needs as a country, if we are to move towards bridging the gap of ignorance among all of our people.

It is also my understanding that the educational value of comprehensive legends on plaques affixed to the statues would be of inestimable value. Much of the violence  affecting our people – black and white – comes from the fact we’re ignorant of one another. 

Statues and monuments cannot, of course, be seen as a substitute for real education that’s not encumbered by the poison of the past, but they would help. Black and white people were embroiled in the various wars in which South Africans participated, including the Anglo-Boer War.

The monuments commemorating these wars, in whatever form, simply gloss over black participation; black people were also interned in concentration camps, but, to all intents and purposes, this observation is seen as nit picking. Admittedly, there are war memorials, for instance in Rorkes Drift, which carry 
representations of black people, but these are exceptions rather than the rule. We all have stories to tell, and in many languages – the Taal Monument in Paarl itself being a celebration of but one of our homegrown tongues. 

Why do we need stone, bronze or wooden structures to connect us with history? Why should we countenance the existence of divisive figures in our public spaces; figures that cause certain sections of society to exult with pride while other sections see the with rage? Why was there such sturm und drang around the statue of Rhodes on the campus of UCT? It is my personal view that the admittedly unnecessary noise around the removal of the statue speaks to exactly those steps, which we should have taken a long time ago, about how we collectively agree on what constitutes  acceptable public representation.

Sometimes, it’s the very  symbolic act that reaffirms the right of people to reclaim their dignity. However, these efforts will only attain meaning if the end is real transformation in all its forms. This will be when it becomes normal, for instance, that Fanon and Nyerere are included alongside sociologists like Durkheim and Weber.

During a recent state dinner, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe reduced the hullabaloo to a single quip: “We in Zimbabwe had forgotten about Cecil Rhodes until SA said it has his statue in Cape Town, where he was the minister of the Cape and mischievously wanted to also take control of Zimbabwe. We have his corpse, you can keep his statue.” It was also prudent on the part of the council of UCT to remove the statue and relocate it to a less prominent spot, where it would not be an affront to all of us who hold that Rhodes was a truly despicable human being. 

For me, the Western Cape – especially Cape Town – is a region where spatial apartheid worked like a charm. It still works, if we take on board the various and increasingly brazen racist attacks against black people. To have a statue then that represents not only man’s capacity to descend to the depths of depravity but also use the illgotten resources to continue his legacy beyond the grave, could not be supported morally. We cannot, following the toppling of Rhodes,  be so empowered by our campaigns to call for a removal of all statues.

There are those that act as a mnemonic, a cautionary tale, perhaps, which we could use in our sharing of knowledge, especially  with new generations. I looked at the picture of former president Paul Kruger in Thomas Pakenham’s informative book, The Scramble for Africa. Top-hatted and bedecked with a sash and medals of office, Oom Paul Kruger could well be a smug, possibly laughable figure representing an odious past. But his very continued existence on the plinth in Pretoria is, paradoxically, a testimony to two things: the time and inexorability of the march of democracy. 

I believe the greatest monument that SA could build is one that does not repudiate and thus destroy the artifacts of the past. We need these to instruct us on how to navigate the present and negotiate a livable future. It is instructive that the youth and the students have taken a lead in these campaigns. But they also have to watch out for campaigns that get hijacked for short-term political 
ends. The symbols have to be turned around and used as a means of reflecting – or negotiating – a shared history. SA has to find a way to celebrate its most enduring monuments – our democracy and our diversity.