The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis for more than ten years. Smith questioned
the “appropriate forum for commemoration”, arguing that
the most fitting memorial would be the creation of institutions that
support the ongoing struggle for increased access to democratic rights,
economic goods and services such as schools and emergency shelters, and
organisations that focus on continued activism. 119
The search for an alternative politics of memorialism need not only mean giving in
to an anti‐memorial impulse.
Heroic biography and exhibitionary interventions
Greater possibilities for a critical memorialism began to be opened up through
curatorial projects that sought to pose questions about the production of images of
leaders and the circulation of these images. The production and circulation of images
and iconographic depictions of Mao Zedong was the subject of an exhibition shown in
London in 1999 and 2000. 120 An exhibition of 200 portraits of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara at
the Fowler Museum of Cultural History in 1997 examined the circulation of diverse
interpretations of Che as guerrilla, political leader, intellectual, visionary, romantic
hero, saint and martyr through the mediums of photographs, paintings and posters. 121
A travelling exhibition, A Congo Chronicle, which was shown in Atlanta in 2002
featured 70 examples of popular paintings through which the life and tragic death of
119 Owen J Dwyer, ‘Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement’, p 666.
120Mao: From Icon to Irony (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, October 13, 1999 ‐ April 23, 2000); a
related display, Fashioning Mao was held simultaneously.
121 Che Guevara: Icon, Myth, and Message (UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Los Angeles, 5
October 1997 – 1 February 1998, curated by David Kunzle); see also the accompanying catalogue by
David Kunzle, Che Guevara: Icon, Myth and Message (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural
History and Centre for the Study of Political Graphics, 1997; unbeknown to Kunzle, the timing of the
exhibition coincided with the return to Cuba of the ashes of Guevara and six of his comrades from
their previously anonymous graves in Bolivia. The rituals of mourning, funeral commemoration and
reburial constituted “a veritable re‐encounter between Che and the Cuban people” (‘Hundreds of
Thousands pay their final respects to Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara and his comrades‐in‐arms’,
Radio Havana Cuba, 13 October 1997, at ).
96