In recent weeks the country has experienced a revival of debates and dialogue about the place and significance of statues and memorials in South African public life.
The City of Johannesburg’s Member of the Mayoral Committee for Community Development, Chris Vondo said he welcomes the debates sparked by the presence of statues, memorial and monuments in our society and in the public spaces.
“Indeed, an enriched democratic discourse is characterised by continuous reflections on all symbols that shape and define society’s sense of identity and nationhood.
“It is the view of the City that underpinning the quest for national reconciliation, nation-building and the fostering of social cohesion in South Africa’s history and the present will continuously be defined by the past- a past of conquest and dispossession, a past of conflict and struggles for a new nationhood,” he said.
Vondo also said the heritage of the past and the new one born of the present does not suggest or reflect the permanence of conflicts and divisions.
He said it proudly asserts and affirms unity in diversity, “it reflects a matured society that has openly dealt with its past and draws lessons from that past to shape a new social order.
“Equally, a reconciling society is reflected by the radical changes of its national symbols reflecting both the past and the present”, Cllr Vondo said.
Consequently, the City of Johannesburg’s policy approach to memorialising its complex histories has been in three definite directions.
He also said it has embraced memorials that would have been divisive in the past and had them rededicated so that they embrace diverse experiences of the people of Johannesburg.
Vondo said one example is the Cenotaph at the Beyers Naude Square which initially commemorated the First World War but today also includes a dedication to all who lost their lives as result of struggles for national liberation.
The second strategy has been to mark the spaces that commemorate the atrocities of the past with the Hector Pieterson Memorial in Orlando West being of high profile.
The use of memorials allows for a memory landscape that avoids triumphalism but humanises those who were wronged in the past.
The third strategy is driven through the policy of public art which animates and stitches together the landscape of Joburg to bridge the spatial divide of the past and to humanise those areas that were in the past imagined as reservoirs of cheap labour.
