Toppled Statues and Fallen Icons: Negotiating Monuments to British Imperialism and
Afrikaner Nationalism at Post-Apartheid Universities
Brenda Schmahmann
Some time prior to March 2013, when I was in the happy position of taking up a
professorship at the University of Johannesburg, a sequence of events took place that marked
the beginnings of my interest in the topic of this inaugural address. As they pertained to a
council chamber, it seems particularly apt that I should recount them to an audience gathered
in such a space – albeit in one different in style and history to the council chamber concerned.
Background: A Council Chamber, Some Portraits and a Tapestry
In late 2008, when I was a professor at Rhodes University, I wrote a letter on behalf of the
institution’s Gender Forum to its vice-chancellor at the time, Saleem Badat. Mooting for the
relocation of various portraits of former vice chancellors and chairs of council which had
been hanging in the council chamber of the university since the 1960s, the letter focused on
the possible inappropriateness of displaying images of uniformly white and male figureheads
in such a context. Although I had in fact envisaged this letter simply for consideration by the
vice chancellor himself, it ended up being submitted to faculty boards for their consideration
also. There it became the subject of heated argument.
Sabine Marschall (2010: 142) suggests that many white South Africans are reluctant
to condone any adjustments to the placement of inherited art not because they necessarily
share values associated with the works in question but rather because they perceive such acts
as “threats to their sense of cultural identity and their future in the country”. This tendency
unfortunately played out in this instance. When I attended faculty board meetings to respond
to the document, it became evident to me that the suggestion to relocate the portraits was
misunderstood by some as just the first move within a larger agenda to eradicate signs of each
and every contribution made by white men.
But it also became clear to me that, for many who were concerned about speeding up
transformation through shifting objects displayed at the university and who therefore
supported the proposal fully, ideas about representation were grasped in narrow and hard-line
terms. While the original letter had taken issue with the display of the portraits in that
particular context rather than intending to question the value of portraiture per se, many who
1
supported the proposal viewed the portrait tradition itself as simply Eurocentric and of no
value. When I expressed regret that the institution had no museum for institutional histories
to which the portraits might be relocated, a number of those in favour of the proposal agreed
with me. This was not, however, because they shared my perception of such a museum as a
dynamic space for discursive engagement but rather because they conceived of it as a type of
Derridian archive – that is, a place that enables forgetfulness in the sense that it consigns
uncomfortable histories to oblivion (see Derrida 1996). It was a salient lesson to me that
evaluating art in light of transformative agendas is slippery terrain.
Although the debate was protracted, it ultimately had a happy outcome. In May 2010,
it was agreed that the portraits of university leaders be relocated outside the council chamber,
and that I chair a working group to present ideas to Senate and Council on possible
replacement works for the council chamber itself. I had meanwhile in fact already come up
with what I thought was a compelling idea for the chamber and, having obtained the
necessary support for it, we were able to implement it promptly. We commissioned a work
exploring the history of Rhodes University from the Keiskamma Art Project, a community
project in the village of Hamburg in the Eastern Cape (one that was initiated by Carol
Hofmeyr, a master’s graduate of the Visual Arts Department at this university). A collective
which, apart from Hofmeyr, is comprised of isiXhosa-speaking members, the Keiskamma Art
Project had, six years earlier, produced its memorable Keiskamma Tapestry which is on
permanent loan to Parliament and parodies the Bayeux Tapestry.
Literary theorist, Linda Hutcheon (1985) identifies ironical inversion – or a process in
which repetition is used to emphasise difference – as key to the genre of parody. This is true
of the Keiskamma Tapestry where reference to the Bayeux Tapestry’s engagement with the
Norman Conquest of England in 1066 is used to highlight the impact of Britain’s own
invasion of South Africa via the Frontier Wars that were fought against the amaXhosa in the
Eastern Cape. The idea for the Rhodes University Tapestry was that it would also involve an
ironical inversion of the Bayeux Tapestry. If the medieval work represented an event that had
resulted in the privileging of Norman cultural ideas over those of the English, its parody
would enable critical reflection on the impact of Britain’s own imperialism on Rhodes
University. It should be noted also that the building including the council chamber is on the
exact site of the Old Drostdy, the key structure in what had been the military headquarters of
the British colonial government prior to it becoming the site of the university. The inclusion
of a work by isiXhosa-speakers in this particular locale thus enabled a metaphorical re-
2
occupation of the space by people who had been divested of not only their lands as a result of
the Frontier Wars but also any agency within a new cultural order.
There is a detail in the Rhodes University Tapestry which is especially pertinent. Its
fourth panel, which examines the university in a post-apartheid era, makes reference in its top
border to the portraits that were previously in the council chamber as well as their removal.
The work thus records a history of display within the very room where it is located. More
particularly, this imagery prompts questions about how works of art which are symptomatic
of social exclusions in prior periods might be treated within a new dispensation.
Toppling Monuments
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, huge sculptures of Lenin or Stalin have been toppled
from their pedestals, ending up broken, like the ideals they stood for, in sculpture parks that
have been established to contain them. But, until recently, South Africa had not seen this kind
of response to art works associated with ideologies that have fallen out of favour. In the
immediate post-apartheid context, where the focus was on reconciliation, it was instead felt
that different cultural groupings should each have opportunities for people and incidents
pertinent to their histories to be commemorated.
Although universities have sometimes removed small artworks or (as with the
portraits at Rhodes University) have relocated them, they have tended for the most part to
leave alone large sculptures and monuments. But events earlier this year at the University of
Cape Town involved a departure from this approach. As this audience will recall, about a
dozen protestors gathered in front of a large and imposing sculpture of Cecil John Rhodes on
the 9th of March. Calling for the removal of the work as well as an end to racism they argued
to be operative at the university, the group’s protest culminated in one participant tossing a
bucket of human excrement over the sculpture. This event ignited a large-scale protest. On
the 11th of March, the university’s SRC issued a formal statement which clarified students’
perceptions that the retention of the work was symptomatic of the lack of transformative
actions being taken by the institution. Developing into the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, the
protest included occupation of the university’s Bremner Building, which houses its executive.
UCT’s Senate was almost unanimous in their decision to permanently remove the
sculpture of Cecil John Rhodes from campus – one that was ratified by the university’s
Council on the 8th of April. Working in co-operation with National Heritage, the sculpture
was moved into an off-campus venue for safekeeping on the 9th of April where it would
3
remain while decisions were made what to do with it. That step may well have been the only
feasible one the institution could have in fact taken in the context of a protest that was rapidly
escalating in scale and intensity, and I would therefore want to emphasise that my purpose
here is not to suggest that UCT acted inappropriately. But I am unconvinced that the removal
of objects deemed offensive is in fact an ideal strategy to be followed under less pressing
circumstances. What I want to do here is to, first, suggest some difficulties with removal I
have in principle, and thereafter to explore some more creative – and I think more productive
– engagements with inherited objects that have happened on South African campuses.
Difficulties with Removal
Eusebius McKaiser (2015) draws attention to “the aesthetic and moral assault on one’s entire
being that occurs when a black person walks across a campus covered with statues and
monuments that celebrate colonial conquerors as heroes”. But while recognizing that
monuments of this type are indeed often experienced as profoundly offensive, it also needs to
be acknowledged that, for many, their removal is not motivated by concerns about revising
visual culture on campuses, as such: instead it is seen as the first step toward, or as being
symbolic of, other kinds of changes that are perceived to be more fundamental – and artworks
are actually perceived as relatively inconsequential within this larger set of aims. One
consequently needs to be mindful that one does not end up denuding campuses of objects to
meet the demands of individuals who are not particularly concerned about the visual domain.
A view that removing an object off campus permanently is necessary to decolonise
the university also usually involves an underlying belief that the work concerned has meaning
and significance which is definitive and fixed. Overlooking how highly critical views about
British imperialism or Afrikaner nationalism will necessarily affect the degree of authority a
sculpture produced under the influence of such ideas might exert in the twenty-first century,
it tends also to promote somewhat one-dimensional views of historical figures. From an arthistorical point of view, such flattening out may also result in evaluations that consider the
worth of art objects only in terms of the people or events they venerate and overlook their
other areas of potential significance and meaning. It is notable, for example, that hardly any
public discourse on the sculpture of Cecil Rhodes at UCT named its maker at all, and there
was no publication amongst the many reports on the incident circulating in the media that
considered her place within South African history. Yet Marion Walgate was in fact one of the
first female sculptors working in the public domain in South Africa, and she produced this
4
portrait of Rhodes in an era when prestigious commissions went to women only rarely. While
she certainly employed many imperialist tropes, the work is also bound up with a gender
politics surrounding its making and commissioning, and this complicates a reading of it as
being nothing more than a symptom and symbol of imperialism.
Removal can also sometimes prevent transformative actions rather than enable them.
If one considers the history of another portrait of Rhodes, but this time at Rhodes University,
one finds an excellent illustration of this. From the early 1960s Rhodes University kept at the
threshold of its main administrative building, and the formal entrance to the university, two
portraits made by Henry Pegram – one of Cecil Rhodes and the other of Alfred Beit – that
had been bequeathed to the institution in the early twentieth century. It also displayed at the
entrance to its East London campus a framed photograph of Cecil Rhodes. When, in 1994
and just a few months after the First Democratic Election, Rhodes University’s Senate
received a motivation for a name change for the university, the proposal was turned down.
Those against the proposal felt that “Rhodes” had become a “brand” and that the university
was not using the name to pay homage to an individual. Such an argument was, however,
difficult to sustain when portraits of Cecil Rhodes were displayed in key positions on both of
its campuses. The upshot was that the photograph of Rhodes in East London and,
subsequently, the portrait busts at the entrance to the main campus were removed. In other
words, by removing these portraits, Rhodes University was not seeking to motivate to change
its name but, on the contrary, was looking to justify retaining it.
While the dismantling of Walgate’s sculpture of Rhodes at UCT was not shaped by a
parallel agenda, its permanent removal from campus may nevertheless have foreclosed a selfreflexive engagement with Rhodes’ legacy at the institution. Staff members Jeremy Seekings
and Nicoli Nattrass (2015) argue that, by allowing a focus on the pain of those offended by
the statue to override tolerance for other sorts of debates and indeed to create opportunities
for sustained argument about what might be done with the removed sculpture, the university
missed the chance to consider the possibility of, for example, developing a museum enabling
a critical study of imperialism. In fact they went further:
Handing the statue to someone else to deal with might make us think we now
have clean hands, but this is an illusion. By banishing the statue off campus,
Senate sent the shameful message that we can wash our hands by othering
privilege and ignoring that we ourselves are implicated in a privileged project that
has benefited, and will continue to benefit, us (Seekings and Nattrass 2015).
5
But if removal is not a productive solution for monuments associated with ideologies
that have fallen from favour, it is surely also highly problematical to fail to mediate or
contextualise them in any way. This may well be misconstrued as suggesting that the works
in question continue to be objects of admiration, and overlooks their capacity to promote
feelings of exclusion as well as offense. A question arises, however, about what kind of
interventions are productive and feasible. I am going to examine a selection of these.
Alternative Strategies
The William Cullen library at Wits University had long owned two prominently placed
murals – Colin Gill’s Colonists 1826, donated to the university in 1934 just after the library
had been built, and JM Amshewitz’s Vasco de Gama – Departure for the Cape, which the
university had commissioned and acquired a year later. The murals are on the upper part of
the double volume room, with the Gill work facing the entrance and the Amshewitz work on
the left. The right wall, however, remained empty for some 60 years.
The paintings by Amshewitz and Gill were intricately bound up with the imperialist
mind-set of the University of the Witwatersrand’s randlord benefactors. Reingard Nethersole
(2000: 34-35) explains this well:
The connection made between the mining magnates and the Portuguese
voyagers, whose civilizing mission under harsh conditions had been
taken up by the 1820 settlers, successfully buttressed the British colonial
foundation myth of South Africa. This tale…began with the arrival of the
Portuguese … and continued with the arrival of the British, who took up the
“white man’s burden” of producing history, civilising the “natives” with the aid
of the Gospel, and spreading trade and industry.
Following the advent of democracy, an initiative was finally set in motion to acquire a
third painting, and Cyril Coetzee, the artist whom the university commissioned, set out to
make a work that would implicitly critique the values underpinning the other two. Coetzee
developed a particular interest in the story of the Adamastor, a monstrous being who appears
to Vasco da Gama as he is approaching the Cape of Storms and who figures in The Luciads, a
sixteenth-century poem. Taking as his source a parody of The Luciads by Andre Brink,
Coetzee transforms the Adamastor into a Khoi chief named T’kama. Most crucially, he
inverts the story of the encounter between Portuguese and indigenous people by representing
it from T’kama’s point of view rather than from that of the colonists. The upshot is a work
6
which upsets the efficacy of the narratives in the colonial paintings and makes evident how
there are very different ways of speaking of South African history than those in standard
narratives. Indeed the painting is what author James Young (1993: 27-48) would define as a
“countermonument” – that is, a monument that both engages self-critically with the
monument as a form and which suggests an alternative perspective on historical events.
Large-scale monuments associated with Afrikaner nationalism present challenges not
unlike that posed by Walgate’s representation of Rhodes at UCT or the paintings by Gill and
Amshewitz at Wits. A sculpture at the University of the Free State’s Bloemfontein campus
that was unveiled in 1929 and located in front of the entrance to the university’s Main
Building represents Marthinus Theunis Steyn, sixth president of the Orange Free State and a
founding member of the National Party. Commissioned from Anton van Wouw, a prominent
sculptor of Afrikaner statesmen, the work was paid for through the fundraising efforts of the
Afrikaner Studentebond, an organization with an Afrikaner nationalist agenda. Also in the
immediate vicinity of the Main Building is a memorial commemorating the 1938 celebrations
of the centenary of the Great Trek, when Afrikaner nationalist ideas reached fever pitch.
Amongst those who organized symbolic treks to Pretoria were eleven students from the
university, and, two years later, the centenary of the Great Trek would be permanently
commemorated through this memorial. Just a few meters away is yet a third object – a
sculpture by Johann Moolman depicting C.R. Swart that was unveiled in 1991. Chancellor of
the university from 1950 to 1976, Swart – who became the first state president in the
Republic of South Africa in 1961 – was a member of the Broederbond, and played an active
role in various other bodies with Afrikaner nationalist agendas.
In 2003, the rector at the time, Frederick Fourie, began to discuss the possibility of
adjusting the placement of the Steyn sculpture. Fourie also thought of incorporating on to
campus an image of Moshoeshoe, celebrated as the founder of the Sotho “nation” as well as
for his military skills and diplomacy, envisaging that he might serve an alternative role model
and figurehead. Eventually, however, a decision was made to change the kinds of messages
invoked by existent monuments on campus not through relocating the Van Wouw work or the
introduction of new statuary which was traditionalist in type but rather by motivating to the
National Lottery Development Trust Fund for monies to commission or acquire a series of
artworks that were more up-to-date in terms of their visual language. In 2009 the university
learned that this application was successful.
Angela de Jesus, the new curator employed just after the award had been made,
indicates that the motif of the lekgotla was identified as a governing idea underpinning the
7
sixteen new works obtained for the campus. Referring to a meeting place in Sesotho or
Setswana, it invokes also the idea of a community council or law court where decisions are
arrived at by consensus. Two strategies were deployed towards this end. One was to create
what De Jesus terms actual “meeting places” – that is, artworks which offered seating in a
physical sense. Another was to create “conversation pieces” – that is, individual works which
prompt discussion because they had subject matter that was controversial, difficult or simply
interesting.1
Although his complex piece would be completed and installed only in 2011,
negotiations with Willem Boshoff for a key work began early in the process. Boshoff’s
sculpture invokes reference to Driekops Eiland, a prehistoric site near Kimberley which
includes more than 3000 engravings, or petroglyphs, which are mostly geometric in type and
have been worked on the glaciated rock forming a bed within the Riet River. Producing his
work from a large rock of Belfast granite which he polished in such a way that it imitated the
wetness of the bedrock, Boshoff sandblasted the boulder to invoke reference to the cracks as
well as many of the petroglyphs found on the site.
Instead of focusing on a heritage which had seen the University of Free State framing
its identity in terms of Afrikaner nationalist resistance to British imperialism, Boshoff turned
his attention to indigenous knowledge systems which had long predated the arrival of both
Dutch and English speakers in South Africa. Suggesting during a filmed visit to Driekops
Eiland that “the people who made these things are to me the lecturers, the professors and
students of 2000 years ago”, he felt the site was “probably the oldest university that we can
have evidence of in this country” (Boshoff 2011). Functioning as a type of homage to the
Driekops Eiland “university”, Thinking Stone serves as a literal seat as well as locus for
interchange and reflection on a modern-day campus.
While making reference to prehistoric designs, Boshoff also sandblasted on to the
boulder various idioms, proverbs and quotes pertaining to rocks and stones. Each is written in
a language used in the Bloemfontein area – whether English, Sesotho, Afrikaans, isiXhosa,
isiZulu or Setswana.
Rocks and stones were not new to Boshoff’s iconography. On one level, the stone
signifies an imperative to exact retribution. But Boshoff’s stone is a large granite boulder, far
too weighty to throw, and it points implicitly to the futility of violent acts of conflict. Indeed
its title, Thinking Stone, suggests the value of intellectual reflection rather than stonethrowing as a way to negotiate difference. But the rock also establishes an ironical
relationship between Thinking Stone and two other works on campus where this motif is
8
featured. The plinth at the centre of the memorial to the centenary of the Great Trek supports
a rock and is encrusted with stones and, relatedly, Moolman’s sculpture depicts C.R. Swart
seated on roughly-hewn boulders – as if he were a pioneer in an unfamiliar terrain. A primary
trope within Afrikaner nationalist discourse, Jennifer Beningfield (2006: 35) indicates, “was
the idea that a new nation had been able to discover itself in the isolated and empty interior
… [that] was depicted as being without history, ripe for inscription”. This conception is
critically inverted in Boshoff’s work where, rather than alluding to unoccupied virgin
territory, the boulder becomes the vehicle for celebrating sophisticated representations which
were marked on to the land many years prior to any Europeans arriving on southern African
soil.
The work also contrasts to those on campus articulating Afrikaner nationalist
sentiments through its visual form. Thinking Stone is in diametric opposition to the image of
Steyn on its storey-high plinth as well as the phallic monument to the centenary of the Great
Trek in the sense that it is low, horizontal and invites people on campus to sit on it in the
manner of a bench, to touch it, or even to climb on it.
Boshoff’s Thinking Stone develops from ideas that were evident in his magnificent
work we have here at the entrance to the main buildings of our Kingsway campus – which is
also a countermonument. Commissioned in 1999 and completed in 2000, it is comprised of
eleven black granite boulders with planed tops and rough-hewn sides, each of which includes
a spiral of script in which definitions for obscure English words are offered in one of South
Africa’s eleven official languages. The words chosen are all “ologies” or “isms”, and thus
invoke reference to the kinds of discourses studied at universities. But rather than being
regular research topics, some allude to fields too esoteric to be probable in a contemporary
context. Others describe actions that, while sounding erudite, are in fact far removed from the
highbrow. But while many amuse, others discomfit the viewer by invoking reference to
prejudice or guilt, and thus to “ologies” and “isms” which we perhaps ought to study rather
more than we do.
The Kingsway campus, as this audience knows, was established in the mid-1970s.
While the original buildings here are like others in 1970s Johannesburg that deployed
modernist language in such a way as to offer a statement about the power of the apartheid
state, the architecture of RAU also presented itself as a concrete bastion intractably resistant
to outside forces – a laager-like incursion into anglicized Auckland Park.
Reinforcing Afrikaner nationalist meanings implicit within the building but
suggesting that such ideals were somehow also authenticated prehistorically, is a monument
9
on campus comprised of three large boulders. While seeming to have been constructed as part
of ancient rites, its three component rocks were in fact transported to campus from Paarl, the
site of the Taalmonument, in 1975. Formally unveiled on 12 August, the monument was
devised to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of Afrikaans as an
official language.
But the university that commissioned Willem Boshoff in 1999 had changed
fundamentally since its founding when its first rector, Prof Gerrit Viljoen, was chairman of
the Broederbond, and its first student representative council voted unanimously to support the
government’s policy of separate universities for separate “races” (Voort 2002:5). By 1998,
RAU had begun providing tuition in both English and Afrikaans for almost all its
programmes and by 2000 more than half its students preferred English as their medium of
instruction. Poised on the threshold of the new millennium, RAU sought to signify its
fundamental transformation by installing a new work on its own threshold.
Kring van Kennis offers a key precedent for not only his use of the rock or boulder as
a motif but also its reworking in such a way that it offers a critical response to earlier
structures. The work reiterates the circular structure of the buildings but revises its meanings
in important ways. If the laager excludes all that is foreign and extraneous, a “round table” –
and Boshoff’s eleven granite rocks are suggestive of seating for an imbizo – offers
opportunities for the democratic exchange of different perspective. And, while sharing with
the language monument on campus allusions to prehistoric structures such as Stonehenge,
this similarity serves to emphasise their differences. If the 1975 monument on campus was, as
Boshoff explains, “regarded as fighting for the supremacy of Afrikaans at the expense of all
the other languages spoken in South Africa”, Kring van Kennis gives equal status to all of
those tongues.
Another strategy for engaging with works associated with values that no longer have
currency is to physically modify them temporarily. This type of engagement in fact occurred
with Walgate’s sculpture at UCT – and it is a pity that it did not glean more widespread
publicity. On Heritage Day in 2007 a group of graduates who called themselves the Kultural
Upstarts Kollective, embellished the sculpture with soccer regalia – super-sized sunglasses,
an adapted miner’s hat in the colours of Kaizer Chiefs and a vuvuzela. Antony Kaminju and
Thabisani Ndlovu (2011: 311) observe how fans of a team may include a “Bishop” who
wears a priestly robe, and whose role “is purportedly to intercede between God and the
fortunes of the team”. In this instance, the cloak worn by Rhodes – here the “Bishop” –
carries the words “WHOSE SEAT IS IT ANYWAY?”
10
One member of the collective, Raffaella Delle Donne (2007), explained that the
adaptations were intended to “challenge the idea that heritage belongs to a static past and to
show instead that heritage is inextricably bound up with the process of looking back as the
nation moves forward”. This focus on making heritage relevant within the present was
invoked through objects and regalia which are normally used to insist upon the visibility of
the soccer fan: its effect on the sculpture was, likewise, to make it more rather than less
noticeable. Additionally important is what Kaminju and Ndlovu (2011: 308) describe as a use
of dress and performance to create a “carnivalesque atmosphere” at soccer matches. If, as
Bakhtin suggested, the carnival offers a space of social transgression through its disturbance
of hierarchies and roles, this unsettling of meanings is in turn taken on by the sculpture:
Rhodes is forced to, as it were, change class and “race”. The embellished miner’s hat is,
furthermore, ironical in the context of the representation of an individual who had made his
fortune through diamond prospecting. More crucially, the embellishments countered the
sculpture’s deployment of the colonial trope of looking as possession: aside from being
absurd, the enlarged glasses, in effect, blocked Rhodes’ mastering gaze.
There was also an intervention to two of the Afrikaner Nationalist works at the
University of the Free State at the Vryfees in Bloemfontein last year. In a work called Plastic
Histories, an Australian artist, Cigdem Aydemir, shrink-wrapped and sprayed pink the
sculptures of Steyn and Swart. The artist observes that the intervention developed from her
interest in how monuments “serve to shape collective memory in public spaces and ensure
against the failure of individual memory”.2 But she also recognized that memory does not
simply fix history in immutable ways and that it is in fact, as she explains, “plastic in the
sense that it is constantly shaped and moulded by our new knowledge of the past”.3 Shrinkwrapping the sculptures developed this idea metaphorically by alluding to vacuum-packing as
a process used for preservation. Understood in this light, shrink-wrapping the monuments
prompted critical thought about the degree to which values that may have informed the
commissioning, making and installation of these historical objects have (or have not) been
conserved on the campus.
Crucial to Plastic Histories was the decision to spray the shrink-wrapping pink – a
strategy that might be interpreted as “queering” the monuments. “Queering” involves not
only rejecting what is generally considered legitimate but also, as the writer Noreen Giffney
(2009: 7) explains, championing those who “refuse to be defined in the terms of, and by the
(moral) codes of behaviour and identification set down by, the dominant society”. Thus,
while drawing attention to a heteronormativity in public art discourse, spraying the
11
monuments an exuberant and shrill pink involves a disruption to their normalcy in a wider
sense, rendering them peculiar and anomalous. The process of queering tends also to involve
an identification of silences and blind spots which underpin discourse – an orientation that in
this instance involves prompting viewers to think about not simply those whom these
monuments celebrate but also those whom they marginalize or exclude. In the words of
Aydemir, the colour pink might be seen as “an opportunity to empower and commemorate
the unacknowledged and equally deserving rather than those simply in power”.4
The University of Free State has handled their works particularly appropriately in
deliberately incorporating engagement with them into its teaching syllabi: I gather there is an
interdisciplinary 101 course which is compulsory for first years and which is comprised of
various units which have attached to them what the curator at the university described to me
as “learning experiences”.5 Discussion of works on campus constitutes the learning
experience attached to a unit called “How do we become responsible South African
citizens?”6
Conclusion
Jonathan Jansen (2014: 13), writing before the events at UCT which led to the removal of
Walgate’s sculpture of Rhodes, indicated that he was “delighted that the two statues [of Steyn
and Swart] continue to exist” on the University of Free State campus, feeling that such
retentions offer “a way of recognizing the sacred memories of others.” But, he also observed,
retention that does nothing more than recognize those memories is “a blow to social justice”
(Jansen 2014: 13). That observation encapsulates some aspects of what I have been
suggesting in this inaugural address.
But, I would like to suggest, retention is in fact desirable also to ensure respect for the
memories of those who were marginalised or disadvantaged through the influence of
ideologies with which the sculptures concerned are associated. As I have indicated in this
address, monuments and sculptures produced under the influence of British imperialism or
Afrikaner nationalism have the potential to be part of the processes we use to explore how
our complex histories have informed our present circumstances. It consequently makes sense
for us to regard the visibility of such works not as hampering institutional change but instead
as potentially assisting us to glean understanding to shape a different kind of future.
12
NOTES
1
Interview with Angela de Jesus at the University of the Free State on 2 July 2014.
2
Video commentary by Cigdem Aydemir on 17 June 2014 posted on “Situate: Art in
Festivals” website. http://www.situate.org.au/artwork/plastic-histories-by-cigdem-aydemir/
3
Video commentary by Aydemir, 17 June 2014.
4
Video commentary by Aydemir, 17 June 2014.
5
Interview with De Jesus, 2 July 2014.
6
The University of Johannesburg could certainly consider introducing a comparable module
focused on visual culture on our own campus. This would be especially timely in light of the
impetus to develop compulsory modules focusing on African contextual realities that was
outlined in the recent message from the Vice Chancellor, Ihron Rensburg, following
negotiation and discussion with the SRC as part of the “Fees Must Fall” campaign.
REFERENCES
Beningfield, Jennifer. 2006. The Frightened Land: Land, Landscape and Politics in South
Africa in the Twentieth Century. Oxford and New York: Routledge.
Boshoff, Willem. 2011. Commentary in Thinking Stone: A commission by Willem Boshoff.
11-minute film. Directed by Guy Spiller. Produced by Helene Smuts. Accessed December 27
2014.
Delle Donne, Rafaella. “There’s more than one way to knock Rhodes off his pedestal.”
Saturday Argus, 13 October 2007.
Derrida, Jacques (1996) Archive Fever: a Freudian impression. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. Originally published in 1995.
Giffney, Noreen. 2009. The “q” word. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory,
edited by Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke, 1-13. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1985. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms.
New York: Methuen.
Jansen, Jonathan. 2014. “Waiting to exhale.” In Plastic Histories: Public art project by
Cigdem Aydemir, 12-13. Accessed December 27, 2014.
http://issuu.com/joh_designs/docs/plastic_histories_catalogue2014
Kaminju, Antony and Ndlovu, Thabisani. 2011. “Playing from the terraces: notes on
expressions of football fandom in South Africa.” African Identities 9 (3): 307-321.
Marschall, Sabine. 2010. Landscape of Memory: Commemorative monuments, memorials
and public statuary in post-apartheid South Africa. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
13
McKaiser, Eusebius. 2015. “South Africa’s Odious Monument to Cecil John Rhodes.” The
New York Times, March 26. Accessed April 17, 2015.
http://www.uct.ac.za/dailynews/?id=9077
Nethersole, Reingard. 2000. “Refiguring Colonial Identity: Cyril Coetzee’s Answer to
Amshewitz and Gill.” In T’kama Adamastor: Inventions of Africa in a South African
Painting, edited by Ivan Vladislavic, 32-39. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand.
Schmahmann, Brenda. 2011. “After Bayeux: the Keiskamma Tapestry and the Making of
South African History.” Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture 9 (2): 158-192, July.
Seekings, Jeremy and Nattrass, Nicoli. “Rhodes and the politics of pain.” Ground Up, March
31, 2015. Accessed April 17, 2015.
http://groundup.org.za/article/rhodes-and-politics-pain_2796
Voort, Thea. 2002. Purchasing Governance and Control for the Rand Afrikaans University.
DCom thesis. Rand Afrikaans University (now University of Johannesburg).
Young, James. E. 2015. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.
14