Toppled Statues and Fallen Icons: Negotiating Monuments to British Imperialism and at Post- Universities

Brenda Schmahmann

Some time prior to March 2013, when I was in the happy position of taking up a professorship at the University of Johannesburg, a sequence of events took place that marked the beginnings of my interest in the topic of this inaugural address. As they pertained to a council chamber, it seems particularly apt that I should recount them to an audience gathered in such a space – albeit in one different in style and history to the council chamber concerned.

Background: A Council Chamber, Some Portraits and a Tapestry

In late 2008, when I was a professor at , I wrote a letter on behalf of the institution’s Gender Forum to its vice-chancellor at the time, Saleem Badat. Mooting for the relocation of various portraits of former vice chancellors and chairs of council which had been hanging in the council chamber of the university since the 1960s, the letter focused on the possible inappropriateness of displaying images of uniformly white and male figureheads in such a context. Although I had in fact envisaged this letter simply for consideration by the vice chancellor himself, it ended up being submitted to faculty boards for their consideration also. There it became the subject of heated argument. Sabine Marschall (2010: 142) suggests that many white South Africans are reluctant to condone any adjustments to the placement of inherited art not because they necessarily share values associated with the works in question but rather because they perceive such acts as “threats to their sense of cultural identity and their future in the country”. This tendency unfortunately played out in this instance. When I attended faculty board meetings to respond to the document, it became evident to me that the suggestion to relocate the portraits was misunderstood by some as just the first move within a larger agenda to eradicate signs of each and every contribution made by white men. But it also became clear to me that, for many who were concerned about speeding up transformation through shifting objects displayed at the university and who therefore supported the proposal fully, ideas about representation were grasped in narrow and hard-line terms. While the original letter had taken issue with the display of the portraits in that particular context rather than intending to question the value of portraiture per se, many who

1 supported the proposal viewed the portrait tradition itself as simply Eurocentric and of no value. When I expressed regret that the institution had no museum for institutional histories to which the portraits might be relocated, a number of those in favour of the proposal agreed with me. This was not, however, because they shared my perception of such a museum as a dynamic space for discursive engagement but rather because they conceived of it as a type of Derridian archive – that is, a place that enables forgetfulness in the sense that it consigns uncomfortable histories to oblivion (see Derrida 1996). It was a salient lesson to me that evaluating art in light of transformative agendas is slippery terrain. Although the debate was protracted, it ultimately had a happy outcome. In May 2010, it was agreed that the portraits of university leaders be relocated outside the council chamber, and that I chair a working group to present ideas to Senate and Council on possible replacement works for the council chamber itself. I had meanwhile in fact already come up with what I thought was a compelling idea for the chamber and, having obtained the necessary support for it, we were able to implement it promptly. We commissioned a work exploring the history of Rhodes University from the Keiskamma Art Project, a community project in the village of Hamburg in the Eastern Cape (one that was initiated by Carol Hofmeyr, a master’s graduate of the Visual Arts Department at this university). A collective which, apart from Hofmeyr, is comprised of isiXhosa-speaking members, the Keiskamma Art Project had, six years earlier, produced its memorable Keiskamma Tapestry which is on permanent loan to Parliament and parodies the Bayeux Tapestry. Literary theorist, Linda Hutcheon (1985) identifies ironical inversion – or a process in which repetition is used to emphasise difference – as key to the genre of parody. This is true of the Keiskamma Tapestry where reference to the Bayeux Tapestry’s engagement with the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 is used to highlight the impact of Britain’s own invasion of via the Frontier Wars that were fought against the amaXhosa in the Eastern Cape. The idea for the Rhodes University Tapestry was that it would also involve an ironical inversion of the Bayeux Tapestry. If the medieval work represented an event that had resulted in the privileging of Norman cultural ideas over those of the English, its parody would enable critical reflection on the impact of Britain’s own imperialism on Rhodes University. It should be noted also that the building including the council chamber is on the exact site of the Old Drostdy, the key structure in what had been the military headquarters of the British colonial government prior to it becoming the site of the university. The inclusion of a work by isiXhosa-speakers in this particular locale thus enabled a metaphorical re-

2 occupation of the space by people who had been divested of not only their lands as a result of the Frontier Wars but also any agency within a new cultural order. There is a detail in the Rhodes University Tapestry which is especially pertinent. Its fourth panel, which examines the university in a post-apartheid era, makes reference in its top border to the portraits that were previously in the council chamber as well as their removal. The work thus records a history of display within the very room where it is located. More particularly, this imagery prompts questions about how works of art which are symptomatic of social exclusions in prior periods might be treated within a new dispensation.

Toppling Monuments

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, huge sculptures of Lenin or Stalin have been toppled from their pedestals, ending up broken, like the ideals they stood for, in sculpture parks that have been established to contain them. But, until recently, South Africa had not seen this kind of response to art works associated with ideologies that have fallen out of favour. In the immediate post-apartheid context, where the focus was on reconciliation, it was instead felt that different cultural groupings should each have opportunities for people and incidents pertinent to their histories to be commemorated. Although universities have sometimes removed small artworks or (as with the portraits at Rhodes University) have relocated them, they have tended for the most part to leave alone large sculptures and monuments. But events earlier this year at the University of involved a departure from this approach. As this audience will recall, about a dozen protestors gathered in front of a large and imposing sculpture of Cecil John Rhodes on the 9th of March. Calling for the removal of the work as well as an end to racism they argued to be operative at the university, the group’s protest culminated in one participant tossing a bucket of human excrement over the sculpture. This event ignited a large-scale protest. On the 11th of March, the university’s SRC issued a formal statement which clarified students’ perceptions that the retention of the work was symptomatic of the lack of transformative actions being taken by the institution. Developing into the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, the protest included occupation of the university’s Bremner Building, which houses its executive. UCT’s Senate was almost unanimous in their decision to permanently remove the sculpture of Cecil John Rhodes from campus – one that was ratified by the university’s Council on the 8th of April. Working in co-operation with National Heritage, the sculpture was moved into an off-campus venue for safekeeping on the 9th of April where it would

3 remain while decisions were made what to do with it. That step may well have been the only feasible one the institution could have in fact taken in the context of a protest that was rapidly escalating in scale and intensity, and I would therefore want to emphasise that my purpose here is not to suggest that UCT acted inappropriately. But I am unconvinced that the removal of objects deemed offensive is in fact an ideal strategy to be followed under less pressing circumstances. What I want to do here is to, first, suggest some difficulties with removal I have in principle, and thereafter to explore some more creative – and I think more productive – engagements with inherited objects that have happened on South African campuses.

Difficulties with Removal

Eusebius McKaiser (2015) draws attention to “the aesthetic and moral assault on one’s entire being that occurs when a black person walks across a campus covered with statues and monuments that celebrate colonial conquerors as heroes”. But while recognizing that monuments of this type are indeed often experienced as profoundly offensive, it also needs to be acknowledged that, for many, their removal is not motivated by concerns about revising visual culture on campuses, as such: instead it is seen as the first step toward, or as being symbolic of, other kinds of changes that are perceived to be more fundamental – and artworks are actually perceived as relatively inconsequential within this larger set of aims. One consequently needs to be mindful that one does not end up denuding campuses of objects to meet the demands of individuals who are not particularly concerned about the visual domain. A view that removing an object off campus permanently is necessary to decolonise the university also usually involves an underlying belief that the work concerned has meaning and significance which is definitive and fixed. Overlooking how highly critical views about British imperialism or Afrikaner nationalism will necessarily affect the degree of authority a sculpture produced under the influence of such ideas might exert in the twenty-first century, it tends also to promote somewhat one-dimensional views of historical figures. From an art- historical point of view, such flattening out may also result in evaluations that consider the worth of art objects only in terms of the people or events they venerate and overlook their other areas of potential significance and meaning. It is notable, for example, that hardly any public discourse on the sculpture of at UCT named its maker at all, and there was no publication amongst the many reports on the incident circulating in the media that considered her place within South African history. Yet Marion Walgate was in fact one of the first female sculptors working in the public domain in South Africa, and she produced this

4 portrait of Rhodes in an era when prestigious commissions went to women only rarely. While she certainly employed many imperialist tropes, the work is also bound up with a gender politics surrounding its making and commissioning, and this complicates a reading of it as being nothing more than a symptom and symbol of imperialism. Removal can also sometimes prevent transformative actions rather than enable them. If one considers the history of another portrait of Rhodes, but this time at Rhodes University, one finds an excellent illustration of this. From the early 1960s Rhodes University kept at the threshold of its main administrative building, and the formal entrance to the university, two portraits made by Henry Pegram – one of Cecil Rhodes and the other of Alfred Beit – that had been bequeathed to the institution in the early twentieth century. It also displayed at the entrance to its East London campus a framed photograph of Cecil Rhodes. When, in 1994 and just a few months after the First Democratic Election, Rhodes University’s Senate received a motivation for a name change for the university, the proposal was turned down. Those against the proposal felt that “Rhodes” had become a “brand” and that the university was not using the name to pay homage to an individual. Such an argument was, however, difficult to sustain when portraits of Cecil Rhodes were displayed in key positions on both of its campuses. The upshot was that the photograph of Rhodes in East London and, subsequently, the portrait busts at the entrance to the main campus were removed. In other words, by removing these portraits, Rhodes University was not seeking to motivate to change its name but, on the contrary, was looking to justify retaining it. While the dismantling of Walgate’s sculpture of Rhodes at UCT was not shaped by a parallel agenda, its permanent removal from campus may nevertheless have foreclosed a self- reflexive engagement with Rhodes’ legacy at the institution. Staff members Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass (2015) argue that, by allowing a focus on the pain of those offended by the statue to override tolerance for other sorts of debates and indeed to create opportunities for sustained argument about what might be done with the removed sculpture, the university missed the chance to consider the possibility of, for example, developing a museum enabling a critical study of imperialism. In fact they went further:

Handing the statue to someone else to deal with might make us think we now have clean hands, but this is an illusion. By banishing the statue off campus, Senate sent the shameful message that we can wash our hands by othering privilege and ignoring that we ourselves are implicated in a privileged project that has benefited, and will continue to benefit, us (Seekings and Nattrass 2015).

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But if removal is not a productive solution for monuments associated with ideologies that have fallen from favour, it is surely also highly problematical to fail to mediate or contextualise them in any way. This may well be misconstrued as suggesting that the works in question continue to be objects of admiration, and overlooks their capacity to promote feelings of exclusion as well as offense. A question arises, however, about what kind of interventions are productive and feasible. I am going to examine a selection of these.

Alternative Strategies

The William Cullen library at Wits University had long owned two prominently placed murals – Colin Gill’s Colonists 1826, donated to the university in 1934 just after the library had been built, and JM Amshewitz’s Vasco de Gama – Departure for the Cape, which the university had commissioned and acquired a year later. The murals are on the upper part of the double volume room, with the Gill work facing the entrance and the Amshewitz work on the left. The right wall, however, remained empty for some 60 years. The paintings by Amshewitz and Gill were intricately bound up with the imperialist mind-set of the University of the Witwatersrand’s benefactors. Reingard Nethersole (2000: 34-35) explains this well:

The connection made between the mining magnates and the Portuguese voyagers, whose civilizing mission under harsh conditions had been taken up by the , successfully buttressed the British colonial foundation myth of South Africa. This tale…began with the arrival of the Portuguese … and continued with the arrival of the British, who took up the “white man’s burden” of producing history, civilising the “natives” with the aid of the Gospel, and spreading trade and industry.

Following the advent of democracy, an initiative was finally set in motion to acquire a third painting, and Cyril Coetzee, the artist whom the university commissioned, set out to make a work that would implicitly critique the values underpinning the other two. Coetzee developed a particular interest in the story of the Adamastor, a monstrous being who appears to Vasco da Gama as he is approaching the Cape of Storms and who figures in The Luciads, a sixteenth-century poem. Taking as his source a parody of The Luciads by Andre Brink, Coetzee transforms the Adamastor into a Khoi chief named T’kama. Most crucially, he inverts the story of the encounter between Portuguese and indigenous people by representing it from T’kama’s point of view rather than from that of the colonists. The upshot is a work

6 which upsets the efficacy of the narratives in the colonial paintings and makes evident how there are very different ways of speaking of South African history than those in standard narratives. Indeed the painting is what author James Young (1993: 27-48) would define as a “countermonument” – that is, a monument that both engages self-critically with the monument as a form and which suggests an alternative perspective on historical events. Large-scale monuments associated with Afrikaner nationalism present challenges not unlike that posed by Walgate’s representation of Rhodes at UCT or the paintings by Gill and Amshewitz at Wits. A sculpture at the University of the Free State’s campus that was unveiled in 1929 and located in front of the entrance to the university’s Main Building represents Marthinus Theunis Steyn, sixth president of the and a founding member of the National Party. Commissioned from Anton van Wouw, a prominent sculptor of Afrikaner statesmen, the work was paid for through the fundraising efforts of the Afrikaner Studentebond, an organization with an Afrikaner nationalist agenda. Also in the immediate vicinity of the Main Building is a memorial commemorating the 1938 celebrations of the centenary of the , when Afrikaner nationalist ideas reached fever pitch. Amongst those who organized symbolic treks to were eleven students from the university, and, two years later, the centenary of the Great Trek would be permanently commemorated through this memorial. Just a few meters away is yet a third object – a sculpture by Johann Moolman depicting C.R. Swart that was unveiled in 1991. Chancellor of the university from 1950 to 1976, Swart – who became the first state president in the Republic of South Africa in 1961 – was a member of the Broederbond, and played an active role in various other bodies with Afrikaner nationalist agendas. In 2003, the rector at the time, Frederick Fourie, began to discuss the possibility of adjusting the placement of the Steyn sculpture. Fourie also thought of incorporating on to campus an image of Moshoeshoe, celebrated as the founder of the Sotho “nation” as well as for his military skills and diplomacy, envisaging that he might serve an alternative role model and figurehead. Eventually, however, a decision was made to change the kinds of messages invoked by existent monuments on campus not through relocating the Van Wouw work or the introduction of new statuary which was traditionalist in type but rather by motivating to the National Lottery Development Trust Fund for monies to commission or acquire a series of artworks that were more up-to-date in terms of their visual language. In 2009 the university learned that this application was successful. Angela de Jesus, the new curator employed just after the award had been made, indicates that the motif of the lekgotla was identified as a governing idea underpinning the

7 sixteen new works obtained for the campus. Referring to a meeting place in Sesotho or Setswana, it invokes also the idea of a community council or law court where decisions are arrived at by consensus. Two strategies were deployed towards this end. One was to create what De Jesus terms actual “meeting places” – that is, artworks which offered seating in a physical sense. Another was to create “conversation pieces” – that is, individual works which prompt discussion because they had subject matter that was controversial, difficult or simply interesting.1 Although his complex piece would be completed and installed only in 2011, negotiations with Willem Boshoff for a key work began early in the process. Boshoff’s sculpture invokes reference to Driekops Eiland, a prehistoric site near Kimberley which includes more than 3000 engravings, or petroglyphs, which are mostly geometric in type and have been worked on the glaciated rock forming a bed within the Riet River. Producing his work from a large rock of Belfast granite which he polished in such a way that it imitated the wetness of the bedrock, Boshoff sandblasted the boulder to invoke reference to the cracks as well as many of the petroglyphs found on the site. Instead of focusing on a heritage which had seen the University of Free State framing its identity in terms of Afrikaner nationalist resistance to British imperialism, Boshoff turned his attention to indigenous knowledge systems which had long predated the arrival of both Dutch and English speakers in South Africa. Suggesting during a filmed visit to Driekops Eiland that “the people who made these things are to me the lecturers, the professors and students of 2000 years ago”, he felt the site was “probably the oldest university that we can have evidence of in this country” (Boshoff 2011). Functioning as a type of homage to the Driekops Eiland “university”, Thinking Stone serves as a literal seat as well as locus for interchange and reflection on a modern-day campus. While making reference to prehistoric designs, Boshoff also sandblasted on to the boulder various idioms, proverbs and quotes pertaining to rocks and stones. Each is written in a language used in the Bloemfontein area – whether English, Sesotho, , isiXhosa, isiZulu or Setswana. Rocks and stones were not new to Boshoff’s iconography. On one level, the stone signifies an imperative to exact retribution. But Boshoff’s stone is a large granite boulder, far too weighty to throw, and it points implicitly to the futility of violent acts of conflict. Indeed its title, Thinking Stone, suggests the value of intellectual reflection rather than stone- throwing as a way to negotiate difference. But the rock also establishes an ironical relationship between Thinking Stone and two other works on campus where this motif is

8 featured. The plinth at the centre of the memorial to the centenary of the Great Trek supports a rock and is encrusted with stones and, relatedly, Moolman’s sculpture depicts C.R. Swart seated on roughly-hewn boulders – as if he were a pioneer in an unfamiliar terrain. A primary trope within Afrikaner nationalist discourse, Jennifer Beningfield (2006: 35) indicates, “was the idea that a new nation had been able to discover itself in the isolated and empty interior … [that] was depicted as being without history, ripe for inscription”. This conception is critically inverted in Boshoff’s work where, rather than alluding to unoccupied virgin territory, the boulder becomes the vehicle for celebrating sophisticated representations which were marked on to the land many years prior to any Europeans arriving on southern African soil. The work also contrasts to those on campus articulating Afrikaner nationalist sentiments through its visual form. Thinking Stone is in diametric opposition to the image of Steyn on its storey-high plinth as well as the phallic monument to the centenary of the Great Trek in the sense that it is low, horizontal and invites people on campus to sit on it in the manner of a bench, to touch it, or even to climb on it. Boshoff’s Thinking Stone develops from ideas that were evident in his magnificent work we have here at the entrance to the main buildings of our Kingsway campus – which is also a countermonument. Commissioned in 1999 and completed in 2000, it is comprised of eleven black granite boulders with planed tops and rough-hewn sides, each of which includes a spiral of script in which definitions for obscure English words are offered in one of South Africa’s eleven official languages. The words chosen are all “ologies” or “isms”, and thus invoke reference to the kinds of discourses studied at universities. But rather than being regular research topics, some allude to fields too esoteric to be probable in a contemporary context. Others describe actions that, while sounding erudite, are in fact far removed from the highbrow. But while many amuse, others discomfit the viewer by invoking reference to prejudice or guilt, and thus to “ologies” and “isms” which we perhaps ought to study rather more than we do. The Kingsway campus, as this audience knows, was established in the mid-1970s. While the original buildings here are like others in 1970s Johannesburg that deployed modernist language in such a way as to offer a statement about the power of the apartheid state, the architecture of RAU also presented itself as a concrete bastion intractably resistant to outside forces – a laager-like incursion into anglicized Auckland Park. Reinforcing Afrikaner nationalist meanings implicit within the building but suggesting that such ideals were somehow also authenticated prehistorically, is a monument

9 on campus comprised of three large boulders. While seeming to have been constructed as part of ancient rites, its three component rocks were in fact transported to campus from Paarl, the site of the Taalmonument, in 1975. Formally unveiled on 12 August, the monument was devised to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of Afrikaans as an official language. But the university that commissioned Willem Boshoff in 1999 had changed fundamentally since its founding when its first rector, Prof Gerrit Viljoen, was chairman of the Broederbond, and its first student representative council voted unanimously to support the government’s policy of separate universities for separate “races” (Voort 2002:5). By 1998, RAU had begun providing tuition in both English and Afrikaans for almost all its programmes and by 2000 more than half its students preferred English as their medium of instruction. Poised on the threshold of the new millennium, RAU sought to signify its fundamental transformation by installing a new work on its own threshold. Kring van Kennis offers a key precedent for not only his use of the rock or boulder as a motif but also its reworking in such a way that it offers a critical response to earlier structures. The work reiterates the circular structure of the buildings but revises its meanings in important ways. If the laager excludes all that is foreign and extraneous, a “round table” – and Boshoff’s eleven granite rocks are suggestive of seating for an imbizo – offers opportunities for the democratic exchange of different perspective. And, while sharing with the language monument on campus allusions to prehistoric structures such as Stonehenge, this similarity serves to emphasise their differences. If the 1975 monument on campus was, as Boshoff explains, “regarded as fighting for the supremacy of Afrikaans at the expense of all the other languages spoken in South Africa”, Kring van Kennis gives equal status to all of those tongues. Another strategy for engaging with works associated with values that no longer have currency is to physically modify them temporarily. This type of engagement in fact occurred with Walgate’s sculpture at UCT – and it is a pity that it did not glean more widespread publicity. On Heritage Day in 2007 a group of graduates who called themselves the Kultural Upstarts Kollective, embellished the sculpture with soccer regalia – super-sized sunglasses, an adapted miner’s hat in the colours of Kaizer Chiefs and a vuvuzela. Antony Kaminju and Thabisani Ndlovu (2011: 311) observe how fans of a team may include a “Bishop” who wears a priestly robe, and whose role “is purportedly to intercede between God and the fortunes of the team”. In this instance, the cloak worn by Rhodes – here the “Bishop” – carries the words “WHOSE SEAT IS IT ANYWAY?”

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One member of the collective, Raffaella Delle Donne (2007), explained that the adaptations were intended to “challenge the idea that heritage belongs to a static past and to show instead that heritage is inextricably bound up with the process of looking back as the nation moves forward”. This focus on making heritage relevant within the present was invoked through objects and regalia which are normally used to insist upon the visibility of the soccer fan: its effect on the sculpture was, likewise, to make it more rather than less noticeable. Additionally important is what Kaminju and Ndlovu (2011: 308) describe as a use of dress and performance to create a “carnivalesque atmosphere” at soccer matches. If, as Bakhtin suggested, the carnival offers a space of social transgression through its disturbance of hierarchies and roles, this unsettling of meanings is in turn taken on by the sculpture: Rhodes is forced to, as it were, change class and “race”. The embellished miner’s hat is, furthermore, ironical in the context of the representation of an individual who had made his fortune through diamond prospecting. More crucially, the embellishments countered the sculpture’s deployment of the colonial trope of looking as possession: aside from being absurd, the enlarged glasses, in effect, blocked Rhodes’ mastering gaze. There was also an intervention to two of the Afrikaner Nationalist works at the University of the Free State at the Vryfees in Bloemfontein last year. In a work called Plastic Histories, an Australian artist, Cigdem Aydemir, shrink-wrapped and sprayed pink the sculptures of Steyn and Swart. The artist observes that the intervention developed from her interest in how monuments “serve to shape collective memory in public spaces and ensure against the failure of individual memory”.2 But she also recognized that memory does not simply fix history in immutable ways and that it is in fact, as she explains, “plastic in the sense that it is constantly shaped and moulded by our new knowledge of the past”.3 Shrink- wrapping the sculptures developed this idea metaphorically by alluding to vacuum-packing as a process used for preservation. Understood in this light, shrink-wrapping the monuments prompted critical thought about the degree to which values that may have informed the commissioning, making and installation of these historical objects have (or have not) been conserved on the campus. Crucial to Plastic Histories was the decision to spray the shrink-wrapping pink – a strategy that might be interpreted as “queering” the monuments. “Queering” involves not only rejecting what is generally considered legitimate but also, as the writer Noreen Giffney (2009: 7) explains, championing those who “refuse to be defined in the terms of, and by the (moral) codes of behaviour and identification set down by, the dominant society”. Thus, while drawing attention to a heteronormativity in public art discourse, spraying the

11 monuments an exuberant and shrill pink involves a disruption to their normalcy in a wider sense, rendering them peculiar and anomalous. The process of queering tends also to involve an identification of silences and blind spots which underpin discourse – an orientation that in this instance involves prompting viewers to think about not simply those whom these monuments celebrate but also those whom they marginalize or exclude. In the words of Aydemir, the colour pink might be seen as “an opportunity to empower and commemorate the unacknowledged and equally deserving rather than those simply in power”.4 The University of Free State has handled their works particularly appropriately in deliberately incorporating engagement with them into its teaching syllabi: I gather there is an interdisciplinary 101 course which is compulsory for first years and which is comprised of various units which have attached to them what the curator at the university described to me as “learning experiences”.5 Discussion of works on campus constitutes the learning experience attached to a unit called “How do we become responsible South African citizens?”6

Conclusion

Jonathan Jansen (2014: 13), writing before the events at UCT which led to the removal of Walgate’s sculpture of Rhodes, indicated that he was “delighted that the two statues [of Steyn and Swart] continue to exist” on the University of Free State campus, feeling that such retentions offer “a way of recognizing the sacred memories of others.” But, he also observed, retention that does nothing more than recognize those memories is “a blow to social justice” (Jansen 2014: 13). That observation encapsulates some aspects of what I have been suggesting in this inaugural address. But, I would like to suggest, retention is in fact desirable also to ensure respect for the memories of those who were marginalised or disadvantaged through the influence of ideologies with which the sculptures concerned are associated. As I have indicated in this address, monuments and sculptures produced under the influence of British imperialism or Afrikaner nationalism have the potential to be part of the processes we use to explore how our complex histories have informed our present circumstances. It consequently makes sense for us to regard the visibility of such works not as hampering institutional change but instead as potentially assisting us to glean understanding to shape a different kind of future.

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NOTES

1 Interview with Angela de Jesus at the University of the Free State on 2 July 2014.

2 Video commentary by Cigdem Aydemir on 17 June 2014 posted on “Situate: Art in Festivals” website. http://www.situate.org.au/artwork/plastic-histories-by-cigdem-aydemir/

3 Video commentary by Aydemir, 17 June 2014.

4 Video commentary by Aydemir, 17 June 2014.

5 Interview with De Jesus, 2 July 2014.

6 The University of Johannesburg could certainly consider introducing a comparable module focused on visual culture on our own campus. This would be especially timely in light of the impetus to develop compulsory modules focusing on African contextual realities that was outlined in the recent message from the Vice Chancellor, Ihron Rensburg, following negotiation and discussion with the SRC as part of the “Fees Must Fall” campaign.

REFERENCES

Beningfield, Jennifer. 2006. The Frightened Land: Land, Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century. Oxford and New York: Routledge.

Boshoff, Willem. 2011. Commentary in Thinking Stone: A commission by Willem Boshoff. 11-minute film. Directed by Guy Spiller. Produced by Helene Smuts. Accessed December 27 2014.

Delle Donne, Rafaella. “There’s more than one way to knock Rhodes off his pedestal.” Saturday Argus, 13 October 2007.

Derrida, Jacques (1996) Archive Fever: a Freudian impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published in 1995.

Giffney, Noreen. 2009. The “q” word. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, edited by Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke, 1-13. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Hutcheon, Linda. 1985. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen.

Jansen, Jonathan. 2014. “Waiting to exhale.” In Plastic Histories: Public art project by Cigdem Aydemir, 12-13. Accessed December 27, 2014. http://issuu.com/joh_designs/docs/plastic_histories_catalogue2014

Kaminju, Antony and Ndlovu, Thabisani. 2011. “Playing from the terraces: notes on expressions of football fandom in South Africa.” African Identities 9 (3): 307-321.

Marschall, Sabine. 2010. Landscape of Memory: Commemorative monuments, memorials and public statuary in post-apartheid South Africa. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

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McKaiser, Eusebius. 2015. “South Africa’s Odious Monument to Cecil John Rhodes.” The New York Times, March 26. Accessed April 17, 2015. http://www.uct.ac.za/dailynews/?id=9077

Nethersole, Reingard. 2000. “Refiguring Colonial Identity: Cyril Coetzee’s Answer to Amshewitz and Gill.” In T’kama Adamastor: Inventions of Africa in a South African Painting, edited by Ivan Vladislavic, 32-39. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand.

Schmahmann, Brenda. 2011. “After Bayeux: the Keiskamma Tapestry and the Making of South African History.” Textile: The Journal of Cloth & Culture 9 (2): 158-192, July.

Seekings, Jeremy and Nattrass, Nicoli. “Rhodes and the politics of pain.” Ground Up, March 31, 2015. Accessed April 17, 2015. http://groundup.org.za/article/rhodes-and-politics-pain_2796

Voort, Thea. 2002. Purchasing Governance and Control for the Rand Afrikaans University. DCom thesis. Rand Afrikaans University (now University of Johannesburg).

Young, James. E. 2015. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

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