Be Kind to yourself and go sit somewhere with Clarence Hamilton's "Good Morning, Fish.
You'll smell the aromas of tripe curry and pap and remember the Aunty who pulled up her nose to the #kasi food, you'll recognize the pretty girl whose mother forced her to Wella straight her hair to escape from her roots, the O'ms who got paid every fortnight and nursed a bottle of whiskey way into Sunday morning, the Aunty who tried to manage and manipulate her own violent beatings, because neither community and state recognized that she needed help, the melting pot of race, class and religion.
The school authorities (church?) who easily assisted the Apartheid system in celebrating and upholding the divisions - the ideal Republiek which held our people into a passive submission, always reminding them that they were a step higher and better than blacks. You'd understand the #impipi mindset a little reverently?
Here too, you'll find the unity of these small communities at times when someone breaks or aches. The neighboring lending/borrowing to make a pot of food at sunset and the #glammaboys - stoepsitters, playing dice and cat calling the girls who took their daily walks to the shops.
Clarence Hamilton writes about two boys' escapades and experiences growing up in Noordgesig - the story tells the Joster/Pieraks colored experience, growing up during 60's and 70's. Their stories reflect the search for self identity in the time of SA Apartheid, the freedom to choose one's understanding of humanity.
I can almost hear a laughing O'm Chris Van Wyk say “Ah, comrade, you used some nice English words there.”
It's a MNCA (grand-lekke-delish) book kawus (bra's) and I sincerely hope it lands in the list of prescribed books for high school learners.
The Western concept of the museum, which was exported to the former colonies, has always been horrendously inverted and homogenised to depict singular narratives of dominant cultural players, neglecting to expose a series of historically silenced narratives of the colonised cultures and peoples.
Although the normative definitions of heritage (which often implies artefacts preserved through ages in places such as museums) tend to speak of tangible property, one is left to wonder how can a people whose land and property was illegally annexed construct a compendium of properties (in absentia) that form their heritage?
I mean properties that speak to the creativity of the community, their methods of securing food and their cultural customs and rituals, which were buried with debris of wars between settlers - the same settlers for whom churches and other monuments were built by black blood and sweat.
Today, we are inundated with monuments and other carcasses of brick and mortar erected to testify that religion and war are sources of colonial pride, while our villages have been trampled underground and cities built over bones in unmarked cemeteries allocated natives who died defending their heritage.
Without a doubt, displacement and constant bridging border frontiers meant that a lot of our collective heritage could not be retained for future generations, as properties of inheritance for posterity. This lack is therefore a form of disinheritance, a tale of stolen and usurped heritage which needs to be excavated from the ruins left behind.
And the lack of de-colonial narratives in museums and absence of black experiences and the biased representations between colonisers and colonised, have psychological implications on communities and for contemporary recollections of history, which cannot be ignored.
Yet many such spaces continue to be riddled with erasure and omissions of vast collections depicting the lives and strifes of people of colour, where even Native leaders who were prominent in their time have faded into relative obscurity.
These varied forms of erasure which expand into the history of modern amnesia about historical events and their contemporary impacts are proving detrimental to heritage preservation, more so when many people don’t feel the vitality and complexity of their identities represented in these places of heritage preservation.
Sadly, heritage sites and museums now face a challenge of systematic art theft, which is a phenomenon that has been known since antiquity mainly because of ignorance about the ideological rooting of each monument or museum and the rage towards the absence of acknowledgement of silenced communities in these contemporary heritage preservation enclaves and sites.
It is however, another strategy that not only involves the transfer of valuable articles, but is also used as a way to legitimise cultural dominance - is the theft perpetuated by self-appointed “saviours of culture and heritage” who often leave unanswerable questions and as a result, the artefacts are torn from their context and turned into trophies - the visible confirmation of subjugation.
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Over several years of researching various museums, I find it unnerving that photographs, ephemera, and important source materials depicting various people of colour at various stages of the development of this country are scarce, and this scarcity seems to have been a concerted effort on the part of the archivists, who deliberately omitted all record of black lives in various regions of colonial settlements.
My enquiry is therefore about appearances and disappearances, what is given as proofs of past events, what is preserved and protected as heritage of a select minority, and also the unseen, forgotten and vandalised archives of those “uncultured communities”.
Renowned museums in towns and cities built by black servants and slaves, have no recorded histories of these involuntarily workforces preserved for posterity, and this indeed was a social project of denial which eventually made erasure a certainty for many communities.
Today, South Africa is famous for its assortment of architectural marvels that stand in many settler towns, established around churches which were clearly built by slave labour who were either subjects to a corrupt settler and chief or prisoners of various wars.
South Africa has rich collections of historical archives, artefacts and memorabilia, and some of these hold some extensive family ties and speak to the how historical events shaped personalities who would eventually be venerated by future generations.
During the dramatic historical processes of the first half of the 20th century, ideas of identity forged a draconian system of white supremacist nationalism among the Afrikaner nation and this unduly influenced how historical events affected people of colour.
Black experiences of the settlers’ wars such as the Anglo-Boer War were scarcely documented, save for the later part of the 1930 and 40’s when an emergence of black photographers meant that many communities were documenting themselves for posterity.
But these records could not be accepted into established heritage preservation institutions governed by racists with segregationist policies and their embedded belief that they are the sole chosen inheritors of this land’s heritage, its history and natural resources.
It is thus unsurprising how the country is inundated with Museums that conformed to the ideological dictates of apartheid ideologies, falsifying even the those truths essential for the perception and conveyance of local nature, architecture, and daily life.
Instead these museums and heritage sites became spaces that did not convey the depth of cultural and historical heritage of the diverse people of the land, and thus unable to demonstrate the intercultural dialogue that was happening throughout the social interactions between settlers and the native inhabitants of the land usurped.
Historians and archaeologists have undeniably amassed thousands of archaeological finds and items of decorative and applied art from past inhabitants of the regions now annexed by settlers who have entrenched their heritage through churches, farms and gravesites.
The meaning and import of individual heritage sites or museums does not, however, lie solely on particular people or items of importance collected by a site or museum, for all these museums have their own particular ways of conserving and making available the range of material they possess.
Although many museums now claim to NOT have been built by people of colour, the same museums nevertheless, still need to be viewed as living, fossilised libraries of truths that stand to be interpreted by varied perspectives informed by their own biases and prejudices, as well as their desire for redress of erasures.
My constant visits to various archives have become essential elements for marking time in a myriad of photographs, and have assisted me to realise how places change while its people develop and retain a sense of communal identity. In those images, the ways people are dressed and their hairstyles tell me about the lifestyle and culture that prevailed at a particular time.
Carrying out the activities described above takes courage and resolve, and dedication that is undifferentiated to self-discovery, a way of trying to piece together identity from broken museums that have neither figments of my past nor any truth regarding details of the said past.
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Museums and heritage sites enable us to engage with events we may have been unaware of or indifferent to, by living vicariously through them and altering the way we perceive them and our attitudes - museums should be spaces for interlacing stories from diverse cultures to underscore the themes of identity, survival, and collective strength.
Museums should facilitate crucial dialogues with art from the past in contemporary settings, offering a unique point of departure for unpacking expanded notions of culture as transient, therefore requiring constant revisioning.
Heritage preservation therefore entails approaching the many ecologies of life, gathering hundreds of ordinary photographs, family snapshots that capture the everyday experience of people, moving through different creative realms—from the family album, as a private space outlining the past, to the landscapes inhabited by Black bodies.
These are memory-spaces that must remain untranslated and liberated from speculative manipulation, must be protected from fabrications and avoid castaways of history, histories of inclusion and exclusion.
Exploring how objects bond to us and communicate with us memories, and how their absences and omission can impact our collective sense of identity, it is imperative that those items that have been stripped of their original function and have become “dead” objects in their reduction to artistic value be reassembled and preserved.
The dignity of each item that has been robbed can only be restored if the community to which it belonged is included in the rediscovery of its intended meaning; and this way each artefact and other objects become a tribute to collective intelligence of a people.
