Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Aesthetics of Power

Duane Jethro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350059771
• eBook ISBN: 9781000182187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Duane Jethro creates a framework for understanding the role of the senses in processes of heritage formation. He shows how the senses were important for crafting and successfully deploying new, nation-building heritage projects in South Africa during the postapartheid period. The book also highlights how heritage dynamics are entangled in evocative, changing sensory worlds.Jethro uses five case studies that correlate with the five main Western senses. Examples include touch and the ruination of a series of art memorials; how vision was mobilised to assert the authority of the state-sponsored Freedom Park project in Pretoria; how smell memories of apartheid-era social life in Cape Town informed contemporary struggles for belonging after forced removal; how taste informed debates about the attempted rebranding of Heritage Day as barbecue day; and how the sound of the vuvuzela, popularized during the FIFA 2010 Football World Cup, helped legitimize its unofficial African and South African heritage status.This book makes a valuable contribution to the field of sensory studies and, with its focus on aesthetics and material culture, is in sync with the broader material turn in the humanities.

1
Freedom Park: Visualizing the post-apartheid nation

Introduction

The bewilderment I experienced during my first fieldwork visit to Freedom Park stays with me still. Driving into downtown Pretoria on a sunny winter morning, I had to pull over at more than one filling station to orientate myself and ask for directions. It was strange because from what I had read, the new heritage complex was supposed to be easily visible from most parts of the city. Perhaps I did not have a sensitivity for the city yet. Peering up while driving, I was unable to spot the pylons atop Salvokop Hill. Representing reeds, the bristling white swirl of pylons on the peak were meant to broadcast Freedom Park’s presence in the city skyline. Many of the locals I approached along the way had not heard of Freedom Park either. Chugging along in a beat up old VW Golf, I made a series of wrong turns, one of which took me past the Union Buildings, the seat of government, which commemorated the union of the independent Boer Republics and the British Colonies as the Union of South Africa in 1910. Thoroughly lost, I pulled over in Pretorius Square, a historically loaded plaza packed with statues in the city centre, opposite the National Museum of Natural History, to get a better set of directions there.

I soon found myself driving into a rundown working-class suburb on the edge of town, motoring along dusty, quiet streets chequered with a few dilapidated houses and rusting car wrecks that seemed very far removed from the heritage site I was on the way to visit. The road ended at a gated entrance with earthy coloured brick paving and a shiny black marble entrance booth that marked a stark futuristic contrast with the rustic tinged surroundings. ‘Welcome to Freedom Park’, declared a leaning white and orange signboard. I had arrived. Fat wheeled, yellow construction vehicles rumbled noisily nearby, as major building work was still on going at the site. Contrary to my expectations, there were no luxury tour buses or vehicles in the vicinity. I stopped the car just in front of the entry gate and snapped a picture of the entry sign, claiming a prized research trophy.

After paying the entrance fee and receiving more instructions I found myself in a parking lot in conversation with another security guard who was kind enough to keep me company while I waited for my tour guide. Soon a golf cart pulled up with a whirr and crunch driven by a casually dressed young man. ‘Please follow me in your car,’ he politely asked. Twisting and turning along a winding drive, we eventually pulled into a parking lot near the top of the hill. I stepped out into the fresh morning air. The city centre sprawled in a wide, dazzling concrete vista behind the young man. We shook hands, and he said, ‘Welcome to Freedom Park. I will be your tour guide. Please follow me. We will begin shortly.’

Informative as it was, that tour and the many others I participated in never did requite the suspense created by the long welcome chain that preceded it. Instead it added to a lingering unresolved sense of revelation and concealment that shaped so much of what I would later find out Freedom Park was about. Thinking about the drive through the city to find Freedom Park, what remains with me still is its public invisibility, that it was occluded from social awareness despite claiming a conspicuous place in South Africa’s landscape of memory. For me this visit to Freedom Park raised a complicated set of questions about the relations between vision and time at this national heritage project.

The irony of Freedom Park’s public invisibility, by which I mean a sense of it being ‘conspicuously inconspicuous’ to quote Robert Musil (1987), as suggested by the unawareness of its presence among some local residents and tourists, despite its colossal size and symbolic grandeur, speaks directly to the central topic of this chapter. What does it mean for a monumental new heritage project like Freedom Park to go unseen? What is at stake when a national heritage complex is in some ways socially invisible?

These questions make more sense when one understands the significant financial, material and symbolic investments the state made in constructing Freedom Park. Freedom Park was planned in the early post-apartheid period as one of a series of new heritage projects that would commemorate previously marginalized black histories. As a national heritage project it was designed to memorialize the struggle for liberation and promote reconciliation and nation-building by reflecting South Africa’s cultural diversity in ways that, as a whole, would work as a representation of a unified, egalitarian national identity. The expansive heritage complex was built using design concepts borrowed from southern African religious and cultural indigenous knowledge systems to reinterpret the primary commemorative elements, like S’khumbuto, the Isivivane or the memorial element and //hlapo, the museum that tells the story of South Africa going back 3.6 billion years (Noble 2011; Jethro 2013). Supporting the museum, the former elements made up an indigenous commemorative complex with S’khumbuto encompassing an amphitheatre, Garden of Remembrance and Wall of Names and the Isivivane with its sacred circle of stones that served as the symbolic resting place for all of those who died in South Africa’s struggle for liberation. It is the post-apartheid state’s definitive national heritage project costing tens of millions of dollars and was intended to be seen and visited by all. Yet, after its construction, it only managed to attract 21,000 visitors a year, which may be taken as an index of its visibility, or rather invisibility, in contrast to its supposed grand stature.¹

This chapter presents a historical snapshot of an early period of Freedom Park’s formation, from the mid-1990s through to the early 2000s. The chapter starts with a conceptual overview of monumentality, visuality and ways of seeing. It then discusses a set of concepts of seeing that emerged out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process. Here I argue that the commission developed and promoted the idea of sight as the most appropriate sensory modality for apprehending the past, for purposes of reconciliation, healing and nation-building. Further, I argue that these ideas of vision as a dominant, national reconciliatory sensibility were taken up by the state in its thinking and planning of new heritage projects, such as the Presidential Legacy Projects portfolio, of which Freedom Park was a part.²I show that Freedom Park was explicitly built up to be conceptually and symbolically monumental before its construction, and in the criteria used for selecting its location in the capital city Pretoria, and positioned to be a focus of attention for how the past would be engaged. Positioned in this way, I show that Freedom Park’s legitimacy depended on articulating a sense of authoritative visuality that reflected the state’s dominance and control over the ability to perceive and understand the past. Ultimately, the chapter shows that Freedom Park’s material and conceptual formation as a new heritage project was implicated in the state’s attempted formation of a visual sensibility, or a distinct way of seeing as a common sensory mode of apprehending the past.

Monumentality and visuality

Freedom Park is monumental in physical size, authoritative, conceptually overloaded and symbolically over signified. Monumentality best captures and conveys the connotations of public prominence and visibility the site was steeped in. Most basically associated with the idea of grandness of scale, as well as authority, the monumental is an aesthetic that, historically, not only is associated with ancient building complexes like the Egyptian Pyramids (Porter 2011) but also travels through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century musicology (Rehding 2009) and architecture (Junyk 2013/14). It is a philosophical idea associated with the modern and modernity, with nationalisms and with state power. But it is also questionable. The monumental, Andreas Huyssen (1996: 188–9) has argued, reflects a suspect modern political and cultural aesthetic. It signifies ‘bad taste and mass culture’, because it represents ‘nineteenth century nationalisms and twentieth century totalitarianisms’, as ethically, ‘its preference for bigness ... indulges the larger-than-human in the attempt to overwhelm the individual spectator’ and finally, it reflects ‘narcissistic delusions of grandeur and ... imaginary wholeness’ (1996: 188–9).

In heritage studies literature the monument is often associated with triumphalism and celebration. As Adrian Parr (2008: 16) explains, ‘Monuments ... refer to the materials used to memorialise an event or person; these tend to be celebratory and triumphal.’ The monumental is accordingly framed as a negative aesthetic because it represents grandiose, nationalistic celebration of the past. These notions permeate the body of literature addressing Freedom Park in South Africa, which links it to a post-apartheid modernism associated with creative arts and industrial projects (Kros 2012), but also to the awakening of a post-colonial aesthetic linked to black consciousness (Oliphant 2013). Monumentality has also framed critical discussion about the appropriateness of the size, siting and effectiveness of the heritage complex as state ‘propaganda’ (Labuschagne 2010; Mare 2007). Suspending any judgement about the qualities of this aesthetic style, I argue that the state cast Freedom Park as monumental, materially and conceptually, in order to assert and promote its authority over national heritage and nation-building narrative by explicitly emphasizing that the site be seen and recognized.

Visual culture studies offers many options for interrogating how visual languages and discourses work to shape perceptions through focussing or amplifying power and asserting forms of dominance. Representative works range from Martin Jay’s discussion of scopic regimes of modernity (1993) and Laura Mulvey’s critical analysis of the male gaze (1989) to W. J. T Mitchell’s work on pictures and images (2005). Nicholas Mirzoeff’s work (2006; 2011a, b) is particularly insightful as regards the link between seeing, ethics and power. Mirzoeff argues that the term ‘visuality’ is not a ‘theory word’ but rather, a ‘nineteenth-century word meaning the visualisation of history’ (2011a: 474), that was tied to ‘a tradition of heroic leadership, which visualizes history to sustain autocratic authority’ (2011a: 475). Visuality is about ‘the making of the processes of history perceptible to authority’, which was the privilege of the hero, particularly an imperial hero, who had the attributes of masculinity (2011a: 475).

But the making of history ‘visible to authority’ is never the whole story, Mirzoeff argues. The ‘assertion of visuality’ is invariably challenged, to some degree, by the assertion of a ‘right to look’ or freedom to see, and the solidarities that arise from the mutual gaze: ‘with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity or love’ as a ‘claim to political subjectivity and collectivity’ (2011a: 473). Claiming the right to look, Mirzoeff opens a way for a counter history of visuality based on the shared gaze of subjects resisting the authority of those actors who claim authority over vision. The concept of the right to look overlaps with what Marita Sturken and her colleague refer to as ‘practices of looking’ (Sturken and Cartwright 2011), but this work also has its shortcomings in that it does not give us a full sense of sight as an embodied practice, or account for how seeing is entwined with other sensory modalities.

David Morgan’s notion of ‘ways of seeing’ is perhaps more helpful for unpacking these aspects of the sense of sight. ‘Ways of seeing’, he says, are ‘visual situations in which viewers assume a position within a set of relations’, ‘a framework in which viewers assume a connection to other bodies within a matrix of possibilities’ (2012: 86). ‘Ways of seeing’ offer an embodied, relational way of explaining how seeing works within the parameters of power, history and culture. Combined with Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of visuality, it enables me to explain the modality of vision the state had hoped to construct and enable, how it could be taken up, but also, later after Freedom Park was built other modalities of seeing possibly superseded it. The nascent features of a state-sanctioned way of seeing, I argue, were developed during the TRC process, where a set of common visual metaphors were developed and mobilized as the most appropriate way of approaching but also dealing with the past.

‘Looking the beast in the eye’

The TRC was an important institution for framing the way the difficult past was engaged in the early post-apartheid period. The first public hearings of the commission took place in East London on 15 April 1996. Officially constituted by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 34 of 1995, the commission was mandated to grant amnesty to perpetrators of gross human rights violations on condition that they make a full disclosure of their participation in crimes of political violence and uncover the truth about injuries, deaths and whereabouts of victims of political violence during the period from 1 March 1960 through 10 May 1994, and make recommendations regarding reparations and restitution. A small number of Human Rights Violation Hearings, which took the form of questions delivered by investigators, evidence presented by victims or witnesses and responses by accused persons, were heard in public and broadcast as part of a special television series on national television. Placing a premium on disclosure and testimony in a televised or recorded forum, the commission’s work created a sonic sensibility that drew impetus from a discursive chain of relations between notions of orality and the purgative power of confession (Posel 2006; Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 214–16). This was because the institution orchestrated public declarative scenarios for the airing of deeply affective, heart-wrenching accounts of political violence, pain and suffering that linked victims and perpetrators in their expressive revelation of the traumas of the apartheid past (Holiday 1998).

It bears noting that the hearings were not just an oral–aural event; they also created a moving visual record, such as the scene of the Commission Chairperson Archbishop Desmond Tutu breaking down on the second day of the hearings, of the tears and anguish of witnesses, partners, parents and victims, that conveyed the affective burden of addressing the past. Complementing the aural and sonic sensibility of words, sounds and voices of the TRC process, however, was a visual sensibility not simply related to the mediated circulation of images of victims and perpetrators. Vision and seeing was also a central philosophical premise of the process. That is, as Catherine Cole has observed, ‘The power of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [lay in its] ability to make visible that which had been unseen’ (2010: 6). This is apparent in the wording of the commission’s mandate, which stated that its work was part of a broad attempt to develop ‘as complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights’.³The televisual choreographed testimonial encounters of the Human Rights Violations Hearings therefore served to affirm the commission’s visually resonant philosophical foundations: a human rights culture based on ‘truth, transparency and freedom of information’ (Cole 2010: xviii).

Held between 15 April 1996 and 31 July 1998 at venues across the country, the Human Rights Violations Hearings were conducted in the full glare of the local and international media. Broadcast in this way, it established a visual language that emphasized public revelation as a means of engaging the past and as a modality for redeeming the future. As such, ‘anchored into homes and public and private interior spaces in different corners of South Africa’, the commission, through the ‘live and visual real history’ of televised inserts, came to function as a kind of ‘grand spectacle’, ‘an electronic monument to apartheid’s past’ (Rassool, Witz and Minkley 2000: 115). The discursive force of the primary metaphors underwriting the work of the commission – namely, truth, secrecy, revelation and justice – further reinforced the idea that the commission ‘staged and remade the past thro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Freedom Park: Visualizing the post-apartheid nation
• 2 Touching memorials: Ruination, public feeling and the Sunday Times Heritage Project
• 3 Fragrances and forced removal: Memory, smell and urban displacement in Cape Town
• 4 Vuvuzela magic: Sound, football and plastic post-apartheid heritage
• 5 Braai nation: Taste, consumption and South African commemorative days
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index