The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Morris Isaacson High School, Regina Mundi Church, Freedom Square and Kliptown could
be developed “into an integrated Heritage Route”. 137
The inscription of resistance heritage in Soweto in the late 1990s was of a very different
cultural and discursive order from the transient memorials and monuments erected in the
mid‐1980s in Soweto and other townships around Johannesburg and Pretoria. Over four
or five months in 1985, as a creative energy expressed itself amid the chaos of violence and
repression, peace parks were created, one element of which had mimicked images seen in
town squares. These had been named after political leaders such as Tambo, Sisulu,
Mandela and Biko. Amid a flowering of civic art, a sculpture of Steve Biko was created out
of debris and “whatever materials people could find”. 138 In the 1990s, the memorial
biographic impetus had shifted from one that had inserted fragile markers of resistance
politics into a landscape of poverty and repression to one that cast multiple stories of
violence and resistance into “a nationalist narrative of heroism and sacrifice”. 139 This
narrative was in turn mobilised into a tourist cultural economy where “the sites of
resistance and remembrance [slid] almost uneasily into the world of cultural
difference”. 140
This was the tourist economy that the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum had to
contend with when it opened on 16 June 2002 with photographic and audio‐visual
displays of “the struggle of the youth against the injustices of apartheid”. Through
“archive, documentary and photographic footage”, the Museum told “the story of the
June 16 uprising and the shooting of 13‐year old Pieterson”. The “legendary” photograph
of Pieterson being carried by Makhubu was not shown inside. Instead one of the other five
137 ‘Soweto Heritage Trust’, Johannesburg, n.d. (c.1998), brochure.
138 See Steven Sack’s discussion of Soweto’s Peace Parks of 1985 as well as footage of a Biko memorial
in the video, The Writing’s on the Wall: The Role of Culture in South Africa (Produced by Mark Newman
for Pakathi Films with support from Kulturhuset Stockholm and Sida, 1998). See also Sue Williamson,
Resistance Art in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1989), pp 88‐9. By 1986, the SADF had
destroyed the parks on the pretext that they had been used to hide arms.
139 Helena Pohlandt‐McCormick, ‘“I Saw a Nightmare…”: Violence and the Construction of Memory
(Soweto, June 16, 1976)’, History and Theory, Vol. 39, No 4, December 2000, p 44.
140 Leslie Witz, Ciraj Rassool and Gary Minkley, ‘Repackaging the Past for South African Tourism’, p
286.
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