| ALTERNATIVES TO WHAT? DEBATING NEW
HERITAGE PRACTICES IN SOUTH AFRICA:
Reflections on the Mapping Alternatives
conference.
Nick Shepherd (University of Cape Town,
South Africa)
shepherd@humanities.uct.ac.za
A report in the local newspaper is headlined
“Saartjie a step closer to returning home
to SA” (Cape Times, January 30 2002).
It begins: “The end of a grim chapter in
Europe’s colonisation of Africa drew closer
yesterday when French senators voted in
favour of a law to accord, belatedly, a
dignified end to a victim of scientific
curiosity”. Saartjie (or Sarah) Baartman
was a Khoisan woman born in the region of
the Gamtoos River in the Cape in 1789. She
was taken to Europe by a ship’s doctor,
one William Dunlop, where she embarked on
a career as a living exhibit in side-shows
and museums. Following her death in Paris
in 1816 her brain and genitalia were excised
and, together with her skeleton, placed
on public display in the Museum of Mankind.
In 1994, the first year of the new democracy,
the South African government formally requested
that Sarah’s remains be returned to South
Africa for burial, a call which was repeated
by the assembled members of the World Archaeological
Congress in 1999.
Sarah’s imminent return takes place in
the context of the coming into effect of
South Africa’s new heritage legislation,
the National Heritage Resources Act, in
April 2001. In its preamble the Act claims
extraordinary powers for the notion of heritage:
Our heritage… helps us to define our cultural
identity and therefore lies at the heart
of our spiritual well-being and has the
power to build our nation… [it] celebrates
our achievements and contributes to redressing
past inequalities. It educates… It facilitates
healing and material and symbolic restitution.
Clearly, heritage issues retain an unusual
salience and intensity in South African
society. Clearly, also, the notion of ‘heritage’
provides an unusually interesting and powerful
lens through which to examine issues of
nationhood, identity, citizenship, restitution
and reconciliation – in short, all of those
issues which have lain at the heart of the
social transformation currently in train.
In September 2001 the Research Unit for
the Archaeology of Cape Town (RESUNACT)
in the Centre for African Studies at the
University of Cape Town, and the Project
on Public Pasts (POPP) in the Department
of History at the University of the Western
Cape hosted a two-day conference with the
title Mapping Alternatives: Debating
new heritage practices in South
Africa. Four focus areas were earmarked
for discussion: the township tour circuit;
community museums; the formal educational
terrain; and the process of identifying
cultural sites. A guiding intention of the
conference was to involve practitioners
from both the formal and informal heritage
sectors, and starting-out practitioners
as well as established figures. A further
guiding idea was that a multi-disciplinary
approach be adopted, covering the areas
of archaeology, history, oral history, conservation,
and architecture and planning.
A wide range of organisations were represented
at the Mapping Alternatives conference,
covering the southern, northern and eastern
Cape. Papers were given by representatives
from the Western Cape Action Tours project
for trauma and self-healing; the Sivuyile
Township Tourism Centre; the Tourism Business
Council; the custodians of the Tanu Baru
site; the Human Sciences Research Council;
the Lwandle Community Museum; the South
End Museum; the District Six Museum; the
Robben Island Museum; the Public Rock Art
School; and the Clanwilliam Living Landscape
Project. Craig Mathews showed his film,
The Himba Chronicles, and Gary Minkley
and Sven Ouzman curated parallel exhibitions
(“Dislocations: picturing hidden pasts in
East London”; and “The rock arts of southern
Africa”).
Discussion was detailed and wide-ranging
as participants undertook to grapple with
the changing nature of the field of heritage
practice. If there was a single theme, then
it was how the practice of heritage, in
a sense, challenges its founding precepts.
Both of the instances with which I began
this report are based on an essentially
simple notion of redress. However, we might
ask: What are the complexities and ambiguities
of redress in a context in which universities,
museums and heritage agencies have lost
their primacy as sites of heritage production,
and now compete with shopping malls, casinos
and game lodges? Or, in a context in which
heritage stories have become fragmented
and localised, and at the same time – via
a paradox which is the central paradox of
globalisation – globalised and homogenised?
Or, in a context of the commodification
and reification of ‘struggle histories’
and ‘histories from below’ (in the case
of the Robben Island Museum and the township
tour circuit, for example)?
Finally, an intractable question (and for
this reason, all the more worth asking):
What would a truly ‘alternative’ heritage
practice look like in South Africa today?
And to what would it be an alternative?
A full programme and a selection of papers
are available on the Mapping Alternatives
conference website:
http://www.archafrica.uct.ac.za/mappingalternatives/
|
World
Archaeological Bulletin