The Politics of Memory: Deconstructing the Museum Then and Now Rustom Bharucha

n this brief intervention, I would like to draw on the mnemonic history of the IDistrict Six Museum in , , to reflect on the complexities underlying the politics of memory vis-à-vis the task of engaging with the past within the immediacies of a changing present. From its origins as an urban shelter for freed slaves, District Six grew by the early decades of the twentieth century into a vibrant, multiracial, cosmopolitan, working class locality situated near the , where people from different backgrounds and ethnicities lived in the closest possible proximity.1 Threatened by these multiracial intimacies, if not by the very real bonds of miscegenation and hybrid social interactions - it is said that District Sixes and their foreign friends were ‘drinking out of the same mugs’2 - the state under the Group Areas Act of 1950 declared District Six as a ‘white area’ in 1966. Following this declaration, it initiated a series of forced evictions in which entire families from specific racial groups were relocated to distant and segregated housing estates. By 1982, sixty thousand people from District Six had lost their homes, which were razed to the ground and reduced to rubble along with civil and social institutions. Out of this brutality, this loss of home and community, followed by a deep desire and longing to return to District Six, a movement of ex-residents was formed called Hands off District Six in alliance with religious organizations, schools, sports clubs and political groups. To cut a long story short, it was out of this predominantly civic and social movement that the District Six Museum was born, first as an idea, and eventually as a practice that was housed and institutionalised in the environs of an abandoned Central Methodist church on Buitenkant Street. Today, when the apartheid system has been replaced by democracy in the new South Africa, and there has been a sustained attempt to museumise the landmarks and edifices of the past to endow them with a new significance, how does the District Six Museum relate to its altered political context? This pivotal question opens up issues relating to cultural

This essay is drawn from a longer narrative entitled ‘The Limits of the Beyond: Contemporary Art Practice, Intervention and Collaboration in Public Spaces’, Third Text, Vol. 21, Issue 4 (July 2007). We would like to thank Bonita Bennett of District Six Museum for her warm support and permission to use the images, and Adele Tan of Third Text.

1. For a comprehensive history of the District Six Museum, read Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating and Curating the District Six Museum, ed. Ciraj Rassool and Sandra Prosalendis, Cape Town: District Six Museum Foundation, 2001. 2. Anwah Nagia, interviewed by Colin Miller, ‘Land restitution in District Six: settling a traumatic landscape’, Recalling Community in Cape Town, p.177. Ziff Journal 2007 87 action and the future of District Six that extends beyond the existing curatorial framework of the museum. In focusing on the actual process of resettlement in District Six today, I will reflect more generally on what happens to memory when the modalities of coming to grips with the past are consolidated in the pragmatic and material realities of living in the present.

District Six before destruction. (Choice between jepg and Word file) (Photographer- unknown. District Six Museum)

Bulldozing District Six (Photographer- unknown. District Six Museum)

88 Ziff Journal 2007 District Six after destruction. (Photographer-Paul Grendon. District Six Museum)

Curating a Home Away From Home

A confession: Every time I enter the District Six Museum, I have to resist the reflex gesture that I find myself automatically making as I cross the threshold, when my hand involuntarily raises the dust off the ground with which I touch my forehead. An embarrassing gesture, I admit, for a secular critic, reminiscent of obligatory gestures of respect in front of a place of worship. I am compelled to acknowledge that my body is simply disclosing that this museum is not just another museum, yet another antiseptic ‘white cube’. It is a crossover space between a museum, a church, a political meeting place, and a landmark of one of the many painful atrocities in the history of apartheid. In critical retrospect, it was nothing short of a curatorial coup on the part of the first curators of the District Six Museum to reject the temptation to display the actual violence inflicted on District Six. This violence could easily have been represented through the usual didactic activist strategies, exemplified in blow-ups of black-and- white photographs representing the demolition of the neighbourhood. Instead of violence and destruction, the District Six Museum chose to embrace and exhibit the tender immediacies of home, a home away from home, everyone’s home. To this day, this ‘home’ continues to be dominated by a map embedded in the floor of the museum: not a cartographic map, but a laminated and hand-made one on which former residents can mark their homes, meditate, do hip-hop, share stories. Over the years this map has become tactile, almost animist, accommodating political discussions that have been directly related to the land restitution of District Six. It is rare, indeed, in the history of museology to encounter a museum that can be transformed into a political meeting ground, where real debates and issues can be thrashed out in relation to the actual mechanisms and legalities of land restitution.

Ziff Journal 2007 89 Along with the map, the other central image in the Museum that continues to evoke the larger topography of District Six is an installation of street signs, conjuring a labyrinth of shops, meeting places, cultural landmarks, and memories of all those nooks and corners where District Sixers kept their appointments, negotiating their endless trysts with destiny in the chaos of everyday life. Both the map and the street signs have assumed an almost talismanic quality, but this is precisely what needs to be questioned in the present political culture confronting the District Six Museum. To what extent is the curatorship of any museum mutable in relation to an altered political environment? Can a museum erase itself? This is the critical question that I had raised in an earlier essay entitled Beyond the Box3 in which my intention was not to equate erasure with destruction, but rather with the more challenging task of deconstructing the premises underlying the foundations of a museum. It is only through such ceaseless acts of deconstruction that a museum can more reliably enable some degree of critical reflexivity among visitors in relation to its ongoing practice, and thereby resist the process of fossilising into a ‘mausoleum.’ Let me present now one such attempt at critical deconstruction: Recently, in May 2005, I faced the challenging task of speaking in a conference hosted by the District Six Museum, which was triumphantly entitled Hands On District Six, an engagingly up-beat counterpoint to the Hands Off District Six movement that had catalyzed the creation of the museum ten years earlier. Working against the grain of nostalgic commemoration, I found myself arguing that the District Six Museum can no longer build its raison d’etre on the desire to return, because the actual return to District Six in the new South Africa has become a distinct possibility for its former residents. Indeed, a few families have already returned not to their old homes which have been destroyed, but to new Mediterranean-style houses that look a bit surreal in the devastated landscape dotted with palm trees, which had been planted by former Muslim residents on their return from the Haj pilgrimage. Today, even as these trees survive, the challenge for District Six has less to do with assuaging pain and trauma than with negotiating the intricate legalities and bureaucratic mechanisms that determine the logistics and economics of return. The earlier trauma, one could add, has not disappeared, but it has entered a different phase of possible healing and resolution. Significantly, this return corresponds with the ‘success story’ of the District Six Museum, which has become a model for community museums worldwide, one of nine representatives of the Historic Site Museums of Conscience, as well as a tourist haunt for international visitors to Cape Town. Indeed, the government of the new South Africa, which has not been particularly forthcoming in its funding for the museum, preferring to prioritise the grand national narrative of the freedom struggle in the Museum, has no difficulty in absorbing the District Six Museum within its blueprint of the ‘rainbow nation’.4 Faced with this blatant multiculturalist appropriation, when District Six has every possibility of being consumed as sentimental nostalgia and apartheid soap-opera, it becomes necessary to question the 3. Rustom Bharucha, ‘Beyond the Box: Problematising the “New Asian Museum”’, Third Text, no. 52, Autumn 2000. 90 Ziff Journal 2007 politics of nostalgia on which the museum has based and strategised its identity and creative struggle.

Rethinking Nostalgia

In a pertinent summary on the ‘uses of nostalgia’, Annie E. Coombes has acknowledged that the ‘idealistic nostalgia’ radiated by the District Six Museum has effectively undermined ‘the bureaucratic language of sanitation and public hygiene deployed by the apartheid demolition teams.’5 But to what extent is ‘idealistic nostalgia’ an appropriate strategy for engaging with the ‘history after apartheid’ now? At what point does the strategic decision not to foreground the disciplinary regime imposed on District Six cease to be productive? One should qualify that even within the museum’s assertively non-violent imaginary, traces of the apartheid system were not entirely eliminated within its curatorial scheme. Rather, its signs were minimised, as, for instance, in a bench displaying the sign ‘for whites only’, which embodies Hannah Arendt’s famous reminder of ‘the everyday “banality of evil”’.6 Perhaps, such minuscule signs of ‘evil’ need to be foregrounded today, instead of being allowed to merely punctuate the omnipresent tenderness of ‘home’ that the District Six Museum radiates. Pushing the boundaries of nostalgia, Coombes calls attention to Debbora Battaglia’s eminently useful designation of ‘practical or active nostalgia’ identified with ‘transformative action’, as opposed to a form of nostalgia that simply plays into ‘regressive historicism’.7 While the District Six Museum cannot be faulted on grounds of ‘historicism’, it could certainly activate its curatorial agenda more robustly in tune with the current developments of ex-residents debating, negotiating, contemplating, and actually putting into practice the return to District Six: a practice that has been sustained over the years by the District Six Beneficiary and Development Trust under the inspiring leaderships of Anwah Nagia.

4. In her overview on the District Six Museum in History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa, Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2003, Annie E. Coombes points out that in 1998 the District Six Museum received a ‘minimal government grant’, whereas Robben Island ‘snapped up 80 percent of the government grant for “arts, cultural and heritage institutions”’ (p. 118). One reason for this relative absence of adequate national recognition in material terms can be attributed to the fact that the District Six Museum cannot be ‘claimed’ either by the ANC or by the National Party, quite unlike the Robben Island Museum, which is inextricably identified as representing ‘the paradigmatic South African liberation history’ (p. 122). 5. Annie E. Coombes, History After Apartheid, p. 124. 6. Coombes invokes Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ through the commentary of Steven Robins, who raises the valid point that by focusing on ‘the worst crimes’ committed under apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission also enabled the more ordinary and persistent human rights violations to be conveniently forgotten, as if they were too small to matter. See History After Apartheid, p. 123. 7. Debbora Battaglia, ‘On Practical Nostalgia: Self-prospecting among Urban Trobrianders’, Rhetorics of Self-Making, Berkeley: University of California, 1995, quoted in History after Apartheid, p. 1

Ziff Journal 2007 91 Instead of remodelling its curatorship in response to the legal activism of the Trust, the Museum seems to have tacitly avoided a direct engagement with the political struggle of return. In the process, it has risked being stuck in a time-warp, resembling an Old Curiosity Shop, whereby its particular construction of the past appears to be frozen in a seemingly eternal contemplation of an imminent future. The reality, however, is that the future is rushing to meet the immediacies of the present. In this gap between past and future, it is the present that needs to be reworked at a curatorial level in more combative ways, instead of being subsumed in a narrative of loss. Contrary to Coombes’s reading of the museum, I do not see it representing a ‘reflective’ as opposed to a ‘restorative’ model of nostalgia, in so far as these categories can be quite so easily dichotomized as in the theory offered by Svetlana Boym.8 In a neat juxtaposition of distinct attributes, Boym sees ‘restorative nostalgia’ attempting a ‘transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home’, while ‘reflective nostalgia thrives in…the longing itself and delays the homecoming’. The District Six Museum, it would seem to me, has luxuriated sufficiently in its reconstruction of ‘the lost home’, but perhaps its need to ‘delay the homecoming’ is not exactly ‘reflective’ but redundant. The narrative on which it bases its nostalgia is at odds with the political circumstances today: why is it necessary to luxuriate in ‘the lost home’ when new ones are available or in the making? Inevitably, at the risk of reopening wounds, it becomes necessary to ‘destroy’ the symbolic reconstruction of a home-away-from-home in order to remember the demolition of ‘real’ homes in a more compelling and complex way. Now is the time to re-insert the violence that had been strategically excised when the Museum first opened. Instead of preserving the omnipresent aura of tenderness represented by household memorabilia, calico memory-cloths, sepia-tinted photographs, and cozy reconstructions of private rooms and sound archives, my own curatorial instinct would be to strip the museum of its existing textures down to the rudimentary and monochromatic street signs. But, instead of merely displaying these signs in the form of an installation, it would be necessary to get behind their surfaces and tell the story of their actual retrieval. Significantly, the street signs were retrieved from the apartheid bureaucrat, David Elrick, who had been officially appointed to demolish District Six. After completing his mission, it appears that Mr. Elrick was unable to let go of the signs, which he perversely and inexplicably secreted in the privacy of his home. When the District Sixers attempted to approach him, ‘Negotiations were difficult. He was anxious about meeting them, scared of being prosecuted for “war crimes”. Some of the [District Sixers] were bitter and resented him, wanting no dealings with everything he stood for. However, the power of this remaining concrete evidence of District Six was stronger than both fear and anger’.9 Contrary to Annie Coombes’s description of the 8. All references to Svetlana Boym in this paragraph are drawn from The Future of Nostalgia, New York, Basic Books, 2001, quoted in History after Apartheid, p. 125. 9. Sandra Prosalendis’s account of the negotiations with David Elrick, quoted in History after Apartheid, p. 126. 10. Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid, p. 126. 92 Ziff Journal 2007 retrieval of the street signs as ‘a wonderfully ironic fairy tale’,10 I find it disturbing even to think of turning to the agencies of destruction to be gifted the remnants of a former life. And yet, this is precisely what the founders of the District Six Museum were compelled to do, as they negotiated the return of the street signs from the Demolition Man himself. Drawing on such creative uses of destruction, a new curatorial imaginary for the District Six Museum is badly needed that can counter the selective amnesia of nostalgia that the new South African state and its corporate and tourist agencies are keen on promoting. Instead of continuing to ‘warm the cockles of our hearts’, as Bertolt Brecht would put it, the museum needs to open itself to the chill of history by looking outwards beyond the framework of the museum and its inventory of preciously collected memories. Beyond the museum, one has no other option but to encounter both the contradictory realities of resettlement (where many ex-District Sixers may not want to return to District Six and yet claim compensation) and the aggressive realities of real estate.

Land restitution public meetings in the Museum (Courtesy: District Six Museum)

Exterior of the District Six Museum. (Photographer- Lutz Kosbab, District Six Museum collection)

Ziff Journal 2007 93 The fact is that between the Hands off District Six movement and the Hands on District Six conference, District Six - as a topographical space - has been almost entirely collapsed in public discourse into the institution of the museum itself. But, simultaneously, the speculators of real estate have lost no time in scouting around for new purchases and appropriations of land, cashing in on the symbolic capital of the District Six Museum without caring to share its financial gains through an acknowledgment of the museum’s intellectual property rights. At this critical juncture, therefore, it becomes necessary for artists and former residents to claim that all of District Six is District Six, not just the museum. Entrance of the District Six Museum and To claim this as-yet unclaimed land as the Street Signs installation (Courtesy: District Six Museum) public property, the existing curators of the District Six Museum need to explore new political strategies, practices, and interactions with the public whereby the history and social memory of District Six can be re-inscribed in its terrain. Instead of depoliticising its practice through the mainstreaming of its distinguished museological record, it needs to re-politicise its raison d’etre through new engagements with public space. Inevitably, this will require a more critically reflexive articulation of the museum’s interstitial position between building civil society in the new South Africa, and, simultaneously, re-imagining the political within the emergent contradictions of the here and now.

The Future of Memory

Having located the position of the District Six Museum, let me now push the question of memory vis-à-vis the ongoing process of actual resettlement in District Six, which is being implemented by the District Six Beneficiary and Development Trust independently of the Museum’s predominantly symbolic embodiment of a ‘home away from home’. This process of resettlement needs to be situated within the larger framework of Truth and Reconciliation on the basis of which the new South Africa has formed its new constitution and democratic structure, even as poverty, violence, and racial tensions continue to be palpably alive, challenging the myth of reconciliation at ground levels. In an earlier essay Between Truth and Reconciliation,11 I had questioned the viability of the performative and symbolic dimensions of the Truth and

94 Ziff Journal 2007 Reconciliation Commissions, which assumed soap-operatic status in the televised renderings of harrowing stories of pain and torture. These stories were told by a sampling of the victims of apartheid, representing millions of people whose stories are never likely to be shared in the public domain. Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) was built on the premise that the victims of apartheid would be recognised through the telling of their stories, whose ‘truth’ would be duly honoured at emotional and factual levels. Furthermore, it was assumed at a somewhat illusory level that the telling of the story would also be cathartic for the victims and enable them to come to terms with the past. In other words, TRC worked on the highly idealistic assumption that it was possible to engage with memory at deep psychophysical levels, and, in certain cases, to ‘kill’ the trauma of the past altogether. For the perpetrators of violence, it was assumed by TRC’s custodians that in listening to the stories of victims in which the perpetrators were directly complicit as aggressors, murderers, torturers, and rapists, that these criminals would receive amnesty for acknowledging their roles and actions in these crimes. Once again, there was the assumption that in the act of listening to the story relating to their specific crimes, and in ostensibly empathising with the victim’s suffering, that the perpetrators would be repentant at some level. In reality, however, their brazen attitudes often revealed defiance and arrogance, rather than a genuine expression of repentance. Nonetheless, they succeeded in receiving amnesty and in being rehabilitated as citizens in the new South Africa. At both levels, in the telling of the stories and the listening to the stories, accompanied by assumptions of ‘truth’ and ‘amnesty’, respectively, it was assumed that reconciliation could be achieved without going through the time-tested mechanisms of justice in its official procedures. In short, justice was let off the hook with the one crucial inclusion in the ‘reconciliation package’ of appropriate reparations being made to the victims of apartheid. These reparations, which provided a much-needed material dimension to the overly symbolic and ritualistic performativity of TRC, were often undermined or eliminated in the emotionally charged rhetoric of TRC. Involving technicalities and bureaucratic processes, in addition to financial commitments on the part of the State, these reparations were sidelined and subjected to all kinds of delays and compromises, before they eventually materialised in mere trickles of what was earlier promised. Justice delayed can be justice denied. I bring up this background on TRC to highlight the radical contribution of the District Six Beneficiary and Development Trust, which has now entered its most critical phase of actually resettling some of the oldest District Sixers into their new homes: a process which has not been without its own contradictions, risks, and emotional upheavals. After all, these new ‘homes’ are not what the District Sixers had left behind; to the credit of the Trust, these homes do not assume to be replicas or simulacra of the older homes, but offer viable substitutes of residence. How this will work out in a radically altered context of real estate and taxation, with the ‘new’ District Six located in a decisively up-market economy, is open to speculation. Ziff Journal 2007 95 What cannot be denied is that the Trust has not evaded the necessity of implementing reparations in the larger search for social justice. Contributing to the complexity of resettlement is the fact that many District Sixers have created new roots in the residencies to which they had been forcibly relocated by the apartheid government. Once bleak and forbidding, these ‘second homes’ have taken on a life of their own, and for some District Sixers, this is where they want to be. Supplementing this paradoxical home-truth, one should acknowledge that the ways of migration can never be predicted, in so far as dislocations also necessitate relocations, which may not be necessarily unproductive in the long run. New homes can be invested with more memory than the old ones, which are allowed to fade into oblivion, testifying to the critical truism that as much as it matters to remember, it is equally necessary to forget. Remembrance and forgetting are caught in a dialectic of evolving temporalities, assuming different modalities and accents for different people, at different points in time, wherever they may be located. In this sense, the diaspora of District Sixers will continue to expand, re-assembling and getting dispersed, according to new configurations of migration and residence. Will District Six be remembered in the process, or will its memory simply become more diffused over the years embodying several different narratives rather than the master narrative that is incarnated in the museum itself? Time alone will tell. What will be remembered in addition to the creative and symbolic presence of the District Six Museum will be the achievement of the District Six Beneficiary and Development Trust not just at a material level, but at a moral and ethical level as well. In one of its earliest deliberations, to which it has remained doggedly firm over the years, the Trust made the exemplary decision that ‘African’ South Africans would be regarded as the legitimate owners and beneficiaries of land in District Six, along with other communities. The decision is exemplary precisely because ‘Africans’ were technically denied any ownership rights during the apartheid regime, and therefore it could have been legally possible for them to be overlooked in the resettlement process. In the ethical and collective decision made by the Trust to uphold the rights of blacks, which was not free of debate or questioning, what stands out is the primacy of justice. This is not a mere deference to the official tenets of the Law, which, in essence, legitimises illegality and exclusion. Rather, this grassroots justice has to be understood from the perspective of an uprooted people, who do not wish to inflict more segregation on themselves by prioritising the rights of one group of people over another on the basis of colour. In this dialogic and community-driven consolidation of justice at ground levels, we find a direct and positive rejoinder to the official prevarications around reparations in the post-TRC political scenario of the new South Africa. Perhaps, it is through such subaltern assertions that one can learn to confront the traumas of the past with practical resolution and renewed confidence in the agency of people to build the very terms of an active and engaged citizenship. 96 Ziff Journal 2007