Under the aegis of the post-apartheid government, much emphasis has been placed on the transformation and democratisation of the heritage sector in South Africa since 1994. The emergent new landscape of memory relies heavily on commemorative monuments, memorials and statues aimed at reconciliation, nation-building and the creation of a shared public history. But not everyone identifies with these new symbolic markers and their associated interpretation of the past. Drawing on a number of theoretical perspectives, this book critically investigates the flourishing monument phenomenon in South Africa, the political discourses that fuel it; its impact on identity formation, its potential benefits, and most importantly its ambivalences and contradictions.

This book investigates how monuments have been used in Africa as tools of oppression and dominance, from the colonial period up to the present day. The book asks what the decolonisation of historical monuments and geographies might entail and how this could contribute to the creation of a post-imperial world. In recent times, African movements to overthrow the symbols and monuments of the colonial era have gathered pace as a means of renaming, reclassifying, and reimagining colonial identities and spaces. Movements such as #RhodesMustFall in South Africa have sprung up around the world, connected by a history of Black life struggles, erasures, oppression, suppression, and the depression of Black biopolitics. This book provides an important multidisciplinary intervention in the discourse on monuments and memories, asking what they are, what they have been used to represent, and ultimately what they can reveal about past and present forms of pain and oppression. Drawing on insights from philosophy, historical sociology, politics, museum, and literary studies, this book will be of interest to a range of scholars with an interest in the decolonisation of global African history.

For the first time, the 92-metre frieze of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, one of the largest historical narratives in marble, has been made the subject of a book. The pictorial narrative of the Boer pioneers who conquered South Africa’s interior during the 'Great Trek' (1835-52) represents a crucial period of South Africa’s past. Conceptualising the frieze both reflected on and contributed to the country’s socio-political debates in the 1930s and 1940s when it was made. The book considers the active role the Monument played in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the development of apartheid, as well as its place in post-apartheid heritage. The frieze is unique in that it provides rare evidence of the complex processes followed in creating a major monument. Based on unpublished documents, drawings and models, these processes are unfolded step by step, from the earliest discussions of the purpose and content of the frieze, through all the stages of its design, to its shipping to post-war Italy to be copied into marble from Monte Altissimo, up to its final installation in the Monument. The book examines how visual representation transforms historical memory in what it chooses to recount, and the forms in which it is depicted. The second volume expands on the first, by investigating each of the twenty-seven scenes of the frieze in depth, providing new insights into not only the frieze, but also South Africa’s history. François van Schalkwyk of African Minds, co-publisher with De Gruyter writes: From Memory to Marble is an open access monograph in the true sense of the word. Both volumes of the digital version of the book are available in full and free of charge from the date of publication. This approach to publishing democratises access to the latest scholarly publications across the globe. At the same time, a book such as From Memory to Marble, with its unique and exquisite photographs of the frieze as well as its wealth of reproduced archival materials, demands reception of a more traditional kind, that is, on the printed page. For this reason, the book is likewise available in print as two separate volumes. The printed and digital books should not be seen as separate incarnations; each brings its own advantages, working together to extend the reach and utility of From Memory to Marble to a range of interested readers.

Since 1989, two sites of memory with respect to the deportation and persecution of Jews in France and Germany have received intense public attention: the Veĺ d'Hiv in Paris and the Monument for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Why is this so? Both monuments, the author argues, are unique in the history of memorial projects.

When the past is painful, as riddled with violence and injustice as it is in postapartheid South Africa, remembrance presents a problem at once practical and ethical: how much of the past to preserve and recollect and how much to erase and forget if the new nation is to ever unify and move forward? The new South Africa’s confrontation of this dilemma is Martin J. Murray’s subject in Commemorating and Forgetting. More broadly, this book explores how collective memory works—how framing events, persons, and places worthy of recognition and honor entails a selective appropriation of the past, not a mastery of history. How is the historical past made to appear in the present? In addressing these questions, Murray reveals how collective memory is stored and disseminated in architecture, statuary, monuments and memorials, literature, and art—“landscapes of remembrance” that selectively recall and even fabricate history in the service of nation-building. He examines such vehicles of memory in postapartheid South Africa and parses the stories they tell—stories by turn sanitized, distorted, embellished, and compressed. In this analysis, Commemorating and Forgetting marks a critical move toward recognizing how the legacies and impositions of white minority rule, far from being truly past, remain embedded in, intertwined with, and imprinted on the new nation’s here and now.

Struggles over the meaning of the past are common in postcolonial states. State cultural heritage programs build monuments to reinforce in nation building efforts—often supported by international organizations and tourist dollars. These efforts often ignore the other, often more troubling memories preserved by local communities—markers of colonial oppression, cultural genocide, and ethnic identity. Yet, as the contributors to this volume note, questions of memory, heritage, identity and conservation are interwoven at the local, ethnic, national and global level and cannot be easily disentangled. In a fascinating series of cases from West Africa, anthropologists, archaeologists and art historians show how memory and heritage play out in a variety of postcolonial contexts. Settings range from televised ritual performances in Mali to monument conservation in Djenne and slavery memorials in Ghana.