'Representing Difficult Pasts within Complex Presents ... - T2M

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Figure 2 Seating sign inside James Hall Museum 'Cape
Town' bus
Immediately upon entering the bus, and
only visible if one made the effort to peer inside,
was a sign stating where ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ could
sit on the bus, immediately positioning the viewer
within a different context of interpretation, moving
from the bus as an inert, technological, and even
aesthetic object, to a divisive cultural tool in the role
of racial segregation, hierarchy and segregation as a
passenger in South Africa’s past. The context shifts to the possibilities of representing disputes,
controversies, boycotts, ways in which segregation was enforced, and resisted, in Cape Town city, and
how it informed the ways in which people moved (or did not move) around 17 . Put the route back in and
then one needs to ask which ‘group area’ or areas the bus served, and the disputes over who could travel
where in relation to constructs of race and identity. Such interpretative frameworks present a material
reality to understanding divisions of transports, networks and society in the past. However, other than the
single sign inside the bus, there were no other alternative forms of interpretation for the silent and static
buses that filled the hall – one had to have the presence of mind or curiosity to look inside the entrance of
this particular bus amongst the many other buses, trolley buses and other such vehicles filling the hall. It
would seem that the hall of buses, indeed, is ‘haunted’ by transport phantasmagorias of the past.
To contrast the pristine representation of the green Cape Town bus, there was a sculpture of a
burnt out shell of a bus (by Peter Meintjes) at the same time displayed at the Mayibuye Centre at UWC,
which suggested a different take on the ‘bus’ as a transport theme; referring to riots and boycotts, the bus
as a sign of defiance. Drawing on a different aesthetic framework, not one of mechanical manufacturing
or engine technology, but of art, it is also aesthetically mesmerizing, and, in a sense, being created in the
apartheid past of South Africa, arguably nostalgic. However, the sculpture of the bus clearly referents a
more socially problematic view of transport history; one that led to social unrest rather than social order.
If representations like this from artworks or photographs either in the Mayibuye Centre, which
contains for example, large banners depicting buses, and photographs of segregation at bus-stops, could
be displayed alongside buses in the James Hall Museum, a whole new and more pluralistic take on bus
and transport history would become evident. Through contrasting two ethnographic ‘fragments’ from
17 Pirie (see references) for example, has written extensively on the history of South African transport.