The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
By Liepollo Pheko · 8 Oct 2010
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it,” Winston Churchill said during World War II.
A few weeks ago, the orgy of grief that accompanied the commemoration of 9/11 in the United States was televised across our television screens. It was replete with scenes of the fallen men and women and their grieving families and compatriots. It was human and dignified and even those of us who reject the ensuing War on Terror could understand and share in that loss and the grief.
Yet our very own 9/11 occurred here on September 12th, 1977 when Bantu Stephen Biko was killed in police custody at the age of 30. Beyond some footnotes on the news and one or two editorials, the mainstream media was largely silent on the significance of his death. Like Robert Sobukwe, Biko has been removed from his ideological centre to a place that allows everyone to own him and his legacy, including the current ruling party, which both men had sharp and fundamental disagreements with. These, they took to their graves.
Memories cannot, thus, float without context and truth. They must be grounded in stories and narratives that valorise contributions without marginalizing or stealing them from their correct origins.
Sadly in South Africa, “official history” for current and future generations has turned into a continuous and often conflicting contest with our own recollections, stories, truths and experiences. In this story, truth is still an orphan.
For example, all but the ANC have been effectively airbrushed from any substantive participation in the liberation struggle. Indeed, history has been effectively rewritten and has even clothed some in underserved glory.
March 21st has been reconstructed as “Human Rights Day.” This day marks the Sharpeville Massacre, which placed the South African colonial situation in the international spotlight and contributed to the expulsion of South Africa from the United Nations. Led by Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, first President of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), 69 peaceful protestors were shot in the back. Dozens more people were shot dead on the same day under the same ‘Defiance Campaign’ in Langa, Cape Town.
The protest marches symbolised a powerful assault on white capital. The withdrawal of people’s labour as well as leaving passbooks at home (as a symbolic gesture) illustrated defiance against the legislated movement of African people. It was a courageous moment of claiming back African humanity and agency.
Reducing all this to the insufficient and wishy-washy “Human Rights Day” is a great injustice to our memory and heritage. Trying to remove the PAC from the equation is part of the historical airbrushing and revisionism that has marked the post-1994 dispensation.
Similarly, the Soweto Uprising on June 16th has been reframed as the insipid “Youth Day.” Again, the role of the PAC and the Black Consciousness Movement has been removed. The migration of the already problematic “Heritage Day” to the inane “Braai Day” is part of this inimical trend to non-memory or memory designed to keep the masses numb and the minority, comfortably unaccountable.
There is little substantive interface between most school curricula, popular media and these events. Every year the link between truth and “official history” is weakened like a bad copy of a bad photocopy.
On June 17th 1992, the Boipatong massacre claimed the lives of 46 people. Boipatong in SeSotho means ‘sanctuary, hiding place or refuge’. The massacre was a culmination of years of intense violence in the Vaal Triangle. Memory is so potent that a friend of mine who survived the Vaal violence still places a black cloth under her curtains so that any light seeping from the TV will not be visible to people on the outside. So indelible are her recollections of the massacre. The real tragedy is that even in the developing history and memory of this country, Boipatong‘s survivors and victims still have no refuge and sanctuary.
There is no political will to remember and honour the real history of South Africa. We drowned the truth under a foggy rainbow.
To a large degree, this country’s closed off and partisan approach to memory owes its being to the legacy of the concessions made during the negotiated settlement institutionalised by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). A platform to speak truth and create honest dialogue about the causes and consequences of apartheid atrocities instead absolved white capital, institutionalised race oppression and colonialism, and thus forced Africans into forgiveness and collective amnesia.
“Official history” decided that no one was culpable, or at least that freedom fighters and their oppressors were on par. At the TRC, national memory and personal memories were renegotiated, recast and left in an indeterminate state of profound injustice.
That we may remember things differently and subjectively is natural based on our experiences and context, including location, race, gender, class and so on. But what is unacceptable is that the memories of the oppressed majority were trampled over in the interests of a skewed, but sadly lasting record of “official history.”
Collective memories enable and are enabled by the societies in which they exist. They are crucial for perpetuating the roles and contributions of the various members of a society. These then lend themselves to the traditions and self-assurance that come with recalling exploits and achievements. This is a much-needed currency in the sometimes browbeaten postcolonial African state.
Yet the colonial image of dark, ahistorical Africa rescued by Henry Morton Stanley, David Livingstone, Vasco da Gama, Cecil John Rhodes and any number of other garden-variety plunderers still persists, presenting us with another dilemma. It sharply exposes our tense relationship with memory and history in this country and on this continent.
“Official history” often insists on removing culpability of wrongdoing from the invaders and in its place presents us with ‘Indiana Jones’ type adventurers. Where there was bloodshed of genocidal proportions, this is instead offered as ‘the good old days’ in beachfront museums in the Western Cape where Boer and African soldiers merrily engaged in playful skirmishes.
Millions of lives, cumulatively, were lost during the colonial battles and yet, the repositories of memory in this country seem unable and unwilling to utter and house these truths. The education system, museums, libraries, bookshops, music, films and popular media in post-1994 South Africa are, largely, unwilling to present anything other than a narrow construction of what memory and national identity mean.
And yet there is a critical relationship between memory and national identity. The plurality of memory is something to be wrestled with and sometimes the best resolution is to embrace many memories because they arise from our various stories, perspectives and filters.
Nation building is a stressful and often contested endeavour. For as long as nations have existed with national identities promoted as the essential locus of collective identification, they have been controversial and uncertain, as their limits are stretched, questioned and reconstructed.
But nationhood as an idea was also created in the struggles that won our liberation, as African people identified with a physical and psychological entity, which existed in the form of a geographical location where cohesion survived amongst members who felt a sense of belonging, patriotism and pride. In this, collective memory is not necessarily an exact recollection of facts, but rather a social context to support and embrace all memories and assure us of belonging, going forward -- and in this, a large amount of aptly unapologetic African pride is vital.
Countries near us recognise “Africa Liberation Day,” as a national holiday worthy of recognition. It remains a stepchild on the South African calendar.
We must be cautious of the approach taken by Churchill, which suggests that memory is not only subjective, but is also an instrument to recall glories - real or imagined - over atrocities and injustices. For any nation, this is a travesty and an injustice to our unborn descendants and us.
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Valid Perspective
This perspective is valid and needs to be published in the mainstream media. I hope they pick this up for wider publication.
The trouble with our history is that it is systematically being erased and sanitized. The more this happens, the more our Africaness will be diluted. Steve Biko stood for independent thought, unshackled from colonial mental slavery.
For the previously advantaged elite and middle class South Africans, it is useful to sanitize the past or to simply erase it completely. This absolves them from guilt and removes responsibility on their part to actively contribute to addressing the injustices of the past. For them business as usual is good business.
For the new upward class, the past is problematic too as they feel less and less compulsion and inclination to address past inequalities as they race to acquire new wealth and status. For them too a sanitized version of the past is useful.
All South Africans need to own their history. It cannot be written by the victor alone.
