Making Memory Space: Recollection and Reconciliation in Post ...

emembrance and as a method for learning about the past. Thus memory space often functions with a
duality depending on the audience it serves - it allows witnesses of the past to recall moments of that
time, and serves a didactic purpose of educating those who are unfamiliar with the event itself. During
Apartheid, many individuals were denied acknowledgement of their personal accounts of events, while
collective memory was utilised as a mechanism for furthering the Apartheid agenda. In many respects
this made it a falsely conceived collective memory. In contrast, the contemporary approach to memory
in post Apartheid South Africa has been a deliberate validation of personal experiences in the hope
that they will become shared and in so doing an emergent form of collective memory will result. This
mode of dealing with the past is best exemplified by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which
encouraged individuals to talk about their own experiences in a public forum. Thus expressions of
private memory, as manifest in public memory space, seek to reflect revised definitions of what
constitutes memory, whose memory is valuable and how it might be meaningfully expressed. The
hope was that through acknowledgment of events of the past, and by allowing some form of shared
catharsis, memory can be used as a mechanism for unifying communities, rather than highlighting
difference. 16 In this way trauma may be shared and understood through collective expressions of the
past. Thus the government is attempting to honour all visions of the past, regardless of which
community they derive from and to situate them in the broader narrative of South Africa’s history. The
spatial implications of this are examined in the course of this thesis, as new perspectives on the
creation, retention and expression of memory space become apparent.
Official representations of the past are readily adjusted to suit shifting perspectives and political
positions. Collective memory is often altered according to political expediency, with subtle inclusions
and omissions assisting to convey specific engendered meanings. Yet representations of the past are
simultaneously shaped by the desire to appear accurate, to reflect truthful and honest accounts, and in
so doing address the needs of the public. The complexity of this position of memorial-as-honest
account notwithstanding, the deliberateness of such an approach offers insights into how societies
and nation-states determine what to remember, who and how, in the context of political expediency.
Throughout this investigation, some primary questions emerge: how is architecture being transformed
to adjust to new concepts of memory and recollection? How does memory operate spatially? What is
the impact of these memory spaces on the city? The first case study, investigated in Chapter Two,
examines the Voortrekker Monument, an existing icon of Apartheid attitudes. The Voortrekker
Monument embodies the most traditional and deliberately immutable form of memory space, a solid
and purposely symbolic memorial constructed with the intention of presenting an uncontestable
version of the past. As context and perspectives on that past have now changed, this chapter explores
whether meaning inculcated into memory space may be revised over time. It examines the
16 Barndon Hamber and Richard Wilson, Symbolic Closure through Memory, Reparation and Revenge in Post-conflict Societies
(Johannesburg: Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, 1999), p.1.
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