/ARTS WEEKLY/CULTURE/SOUTH AFRICA: A Legacy of Apartheid

By Farah Khan Reprint | | Print |

JOHANNESBURG, Aug 12 2003 (IPS) - India has the Gandhi memorial park in Delhi, the United States has its Vietnam memorial in Washington and the French have the Eiffel Tower, now South Africa is seized with how it will remember apartheid and establish a legacy project that speaks quintessentially of the country and its history.

Land and millions of dollars have been set aside to build a Freedom Park, a project to remember the past and to ensure it is never repeated. The park will be built in Pretoria, the seat of Afrikaner power during apartheid, but now the governing capital of the country.

The 52-hectare site has a purpose almost as ambitious as the size of the site. “In Freedom Park we give ourselves a chance to address issues of the present and future and commit ourselves as a generation to handing over an intact, non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, prosperous and powerful nation to our children,” says Mongane Wally Serote, a poet, former Member of Parliament and now chairperson of Freedom Park.

Called a “heritage precinct”, it will incorporate a national monument, an interactive museum and memorial gardens which are already in construction. The rolling lawns, the largest part of the project, are meant as a place of contemplation and meditation.

“There are not many countries like this one which makes a fuss of its unity,” says Julian Beinart, an American judge of an international competition to design Freedom Park. Not one of the 47 entries from countries that spanned architects from Australia to the United States won because the Freedom Park brief is difficult.

“Often memorials marked the end of wars and death of people, so a universalist memorial is not so common. It’s difficult to conceive, because for so long designers have relied on classical forms,” says Beinart. Such forms include triumphal arches and projects like Trafalgar Square in London. “These were more memorials to winning wars than to making peace.”

The three entries selected as finalists in the Freedom Park competition (there was no winner) did not choose classical forms, but chose imposing designs including one that looked like a UFO, while another decided on structures resembling gigantic bee-hives.

“If you’re going to commemorate a whole cycle of struggle, you need a park that has dignity, simplicity and that avoids ostentation,” believes Revel Fox, chairperson of the judging panel.

Another judge, Max Bond also from the United States, says that Delhi’s Gandhi memorial comes closest to the right idea. With its sprawling parks, and a permanent flame, it is an oasis of contemplation and memory in the bustling city. He would also like to see elements of the Martin Luther King heritage centre in Atlanta replicated in South Africa’s Freedom Park.

“The scale of the buildings should not be intimidating,” says Bond. Freedom Park will be built on a hill opposite the hill on which the Voortrekker monument is built. The monument, built by the Afrikaner (Dutch) settlers who left the Cape to trek into the hinterland, constructed the domineering and austere structure as a permanent reminder of their fortitude and bravery.

In the anti-apartheid struggle, it symbolised apartheid power as it jutted out into the Pretoria skyline, dominating the horizon as its architects tried to dominate the country. Freedom Park should be different, not triumphal, say the designers.

It will also go back a lot further than apartheid and begin at the beginning with the theme of “Genesis” to take account of the paleontological treasures discovered in various parts of the country. The Sterkfontein site outside Johannesburg is the burial ground of skeletons millions of years old.

From Genesis, it will move onto a section capturing the history of indigenous South Africans (the Khoi and San people); the colonial and resistance eras; the apartheid and the struggle against it and conclude on the theme of Freedom.

Since 1994, a number of legacy projects have been undertaken, though on a much smaller scale. The most famous of these is the restructuring of the Robben Island prison into a museum. Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, was the prison island on which former president Nelson Mandela spent most of his 27 years jail-time.

Many other senior leaders of the struggle against apartheid were held there and it has been retained as it was then. An apartheid museum outside Johannesburg is also a popular legacy project.

Modelled on Washington’s holocaust museum, it begins with whites and blacks only entrances to give visitors a sense of what apartheid was. Last month, Johannesburg also inaugurated the Nelson Mandela Bridge, a different sort of legacy project that aims to link the largely white suburbs of the city to its largely black inner city. It is unusual in that it uses engineering to create unity.