History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa

by Annie E. Coombes

The democratic election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994 marked the demise of apartheid and the beginning of a new struggle to define the nation’s past. History after Apartheid analyzes how, in the midst of the momentous shift to an inclusive democracy, South Africa’s visual and material culture represented the past while at the same time contributing to the process of social transformation. Considering attempts to invent and recover historical icons and narratives, art historian Annie E. Coombes examines how strategies for embodying different models of historical knowledge and experience are negotiated in public culture—in monuments, museums, and contemporary fine art. History after Apartheid explores the dilemmas posed by a wide range of visual and material culture including key South African heritage sites. How prominent should Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress be in the museum at the infamous political prison on Robben Island? How should the postapartheid government deal with the Voortrekker Monument mythologizing the Boer Trek of 1838? Coombes highlights the contradictory investment in these sites among competing constituencies and the tensions involved in the rush to produce new histories for the “new” South Africa. She reveals how artists and museum officials struggled to adequately represent painful and difficult histories ignored or disavowed under apartheid, including slavery, homelessness, and the attempted destruction of KhoiSan hunter-gatherers. Describing how contemporary South African artists address historical memory and the ambiguities uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Coombes illuminates a body of work dedicated to the struggle to simultaneously remember the past and move forward into the future.

Genres: South Africa, History

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 2003

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Museums and visual culture more generally play an often under-recognised role in building, asserting or maintaining various forms of political culture and identity. From time to time we find a disruptive or dissident museum, but for the most part they maintain or justify the dominant cultural modes and codes. A visit to any ‘national’ museum reveals this role, but seldom is it so obvious as during moments of great change in political cultures and political régimes. It does not need to be a ‘revolutionary’ change – Wellington’s Te Papa Tongarewa is a clear marker of a state-driven but wide ranging change in the political cultures of Aotearoa/New Zealand that included a revision of colonial and postcolonial histories and the dynamic role that Maori played in the changing national self-image. South Africa, as shown by Annie Coombes’ clear and specific analysis of five museum sites and a number of fine artists, provide an opportunity to show changes in the, from time to time, brutal and fractious debates over history and heritage in a national context undergoing profound change leading to the New South Africa.

South Africa is a crucial case study in this relationship in part because the struggle was long but the transformation when it happened was relatively straightforward, for the most part peaceful and resulted in extensive political and cultural changes even though we must in no way overstate the extent of actual change in the conditions of most South Africans. Certainly for a while in the 1990s there was enormous hope, and vibrant cultural, social and political debate and struggles not only over the present and future but also the past as a narrow, exclusive state was replaced by one professing inclusion and as a result one with a profoundly different history not of exclusion but of resistance. It is this process of debate, dispute and making and remaking of memory and history that Coombes explores.

The case studies she selects are in some cases globally renowned and iconic, while in others they are much less widely known, including the intensely contested recrafting of the Voortrekker Memorial in Pretoria that was hotly opposed by recalcitrant Afrikaaner nationalists, the development of Robben Island as a museum to the struggle and in a sense pilgrimage site. She also discusses the locally focussed (by metonymic of the struggle also) District Six Museum in Cape Town and the efforts by the Museum Africa (formerly the Africana Museum) in Johannesburg as places that seek to explore the ordinary, the quotidian, the banal of the apartheid and earlier eras. Most of these places I know (except the Jo’burg case) and her level of detail, nuance of analysis and care to represent, evaluate and critique each case with considerable sensitivity to the moral, political, museological and ethical issues is impressive.

The case that I found most alarming, in part because it coincides with a number of other debates in museums and reflexivity about museum practice, but also because of the way it exposes the dehumanisation of colonial subjects and subjectivities is the ‘Bushman diorama’, a depiction of Khoisan life in the Western Cape, at the South African Museum in Cape Town. That it is at the SAM is the first of the alarming elements: this is a natural history museum, with the effect that these Khoisan are shown as inhuman parts of the natural environment. The second, and equally alarming, element is that figures in the diorama are the casts of Khoisan people taken in the 1920s and 1930s, usually from prisoners coerced into ‘agreeing’ to both anthropometric measurements and the pain and discomfort of full body casts. To its credit, as early as the late 1980s the SAM was trying to deconstruct this exhibit, including panels showing both the cast making and identifying with as much biographical information as possible the individuals involved – but while the diorama exists, the problem remains. Coombes’ discussion of this case is powerful, compelling and uncompromising in its critique and the terms of its inquiry, but it is also nuanced, situated, located and recognises the contradictions and tensions. The discussion also includes a carefully calibrated consideration of a show at the South African National Gallery that in critically exploring the diorama and the practices behind it became itself the subject of harsh critique and extensive discussion that further problematised the question of display, of colonial identities, subjectivities and being.

In addition to these five chapters unravelling museums and material culture, Coombes concludes the substance of her analysis with discussions of a number of fine artists working in and around the questions of racial and ethnic identities, around questions of memory and sexuality, of place and of memorialisation. This is a shift in tone that is hard to manage, but which Coombes does fairly well even though the language of fine art analysis, of arts practice and gallery and site specific inquiry where ‘artefacts’ are made for a purpose in a manner that is different from the way museums often make use of artefacts, but it does sit a little uncomfortably with the preceding chapters. The conclusion, looking at the way the post-apartheid government managed the transformation of South Africa House, its high commission in London, taking account of artistic practice, the existing design and visual features, the requirements of English Heritage that prevented structural change to the building or destruction/removal of the existing art works and the need to replace an apartheid history with a post-apartheid history draws the issues under investigation together in a clear and specific manner.

My only real grizzle is that all the colour plates that relate to discussions in pp 243-78 are between pp 142 & 143 – but otherwise, as we’d expect from Duke UP, the production quality is excellent.

As a discussion of the politics of museum practice this is a superb book – and if it were only that it would be well worth spending time with. In addition, it unravels the politics of social and cultural change, of memory making and historical and historiographical debate in a time of national cultural transformation. In working through five specific sites, with allusions and references to several others, and drawing on the manufacture of visual cultures in fine art practice Coombes has taken those discussions of museum practice to a new level exposing and exploring the profound challenges states have in building identities, museums and other cultural institutions have in engaging with and critically exploring those state-oriented and -based processes and what it means to not quite fit the story that is being developed. This is a valuable and important book, providing an analysis that is rich, nuanced, subtle and detailed, and that we can only hope others can measure up to.

[Adina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written with trenchant humor and astute compassion— like looking in the mirror from across the Atlantic.