History Making and Present Day Politics - Stolten's African Studies ...

h i s t o r y m a k i n g a n d p r e s e n t d a y p o l i t i c s
the funding of heritage sites and certain people from the business world in
need of absolution for their earlier de facto apartheid support.
Martin Murray’s article “Urban space, architectural design, and the disruption
of historical memory” is a piece of penetrating research in present
South African city architecture seen from a historical viewpoint.
In the aftermath of the 1994 change of power, propertied urban residents
have in ever-increasing numbers retreated behind fortifications, barriers, and
walls. Fortified enclaves of all sorts have resulted in the privatisation of public
space. The creation of themed entertainment destinations, like heritage theme
parks, has produced new kinds of congregating, social spaces that are, in the
classical liberal sense, neither fully public nor private. Whereas the historical
lines of cleavage during the apartheid era typically crystallised around the
extremes of white affluence and black impoverishment, the new divisions go
hand in hand with a post-apartheid rhetoric that in Murray’s view has been
transformed into a defence of privilege and social status despite the egalitarian
discourses of non-racialist nation-building and rainbowism. Taken together,
these practices have led to new forms of exclusion, and separation.
Murray’s paper reveals the social functions of enclosed institutions like the
Waterfront that are made apparently inclusive by the use of cultural heritage.
The article unmasks how the use of invented traditions in styled cocooned
areas can disguise the meaning of class stratification.
Conflicting views of history
As the first contribution in Part Three of this book, dealing with differing interpretations
of South African history, Bernhard Magubane’s article “Whose
memory – whose history” argues that colonial history writing was deliberately
constructed to justify genocidal wars. 101 After 1910, when the fact of conquest
had been firmly established, new methods were, in Magubane’s view, used to
reduce black people to objects. The crude racism of Theal was replaced by a
liberal discourse that used much energy to explore whether the policies of segregation
were compatible with capitalist growth. 102 After the Second World
101. This could be true for writings like: Theal, George M., South Africa, London,
George Allen & Unwin Ltd; Theal, George McCall, Records of the Cape Colony, 36
vol., printed for the Government of the Cape Colony, London, 1897–1905.
102. Even if it is debatable if Macmillan was a classical liberal, his work should be viewed
as important for this approach. Macmillan, William M., Complex South Africa. An
Economic Footnote to History, London, Faber and Faber, 1930.
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