Remaking the urban: Heritage and transformation in Nelson Mandela Bay 9781526140296

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Remaking the urban

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Remaking the urban

Heritage and transformation in Nelson Mandela Bay Naomi Roux

manchester university press

Copyright © Naomi Roux 2021

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The right of Naomi Roux to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4028 9 hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the ­persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image credit: Naomi Roux, Port Elizabeth, 2013

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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Contents

List of figures page vi Acknowledgementsix List of abbreviations xiii Map of Port Elizabeth xv 1 Introduction: The articulated skeleton  2 Memorial constructions: The Red Location Cultural Precinct  3 Forced removals and landscapes of memory  4 Public art and place-making  5 Politics of recognition: The Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho  6 Conclusion 

1 33 84 131 167 220

Bibliography230 Index242

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Figures

  1 Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication, Kliptown, Johannesburg, four years after its construction. page 4   2 Red Location Museum of Struggle, New Brighton, Port Elizabeth: four years after opening, constructed in the same time period as the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication.4   3 Abandoned memorial to the assassinated Cradock Four activists, Cradock, Eastern Cape. 9   4 The Red Location Museum of Struggle, front entrance. 34   5 Red Location Museum in situ, viewed from the ­residential area at the southern edge. 35   6 View of the ‘memory boxes’ within the museum. 45   7 Interior view of the museum from the main entrance. 46   8 New subsidised housing handed over to residents in October 2006.54   9 Empty sarcophagus hidden behind a sliding wall in the museum.58 10 The Hall of Columns. 61 11 Recreated shack interior in one of the ‘memory boxes’. 65 12 Last remaining fragment of original Red Location housing.67 13 Original cottages after collapse. Annette du Plessis, 2008. 68 14 South End’s erasure, c.1975. Image courtesy of Yusuf Agherdien, original photographer unknown. 88 15 View of the Hall of Memories in the South End Museum. 100 16 ‘Life’ panel, detail of the Hall of Memories exhibition, South End Museum. 101 17 Detail of the Home Life exhibition before its re-curation. 107

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Figures vii

18 South End ruins in the Baakens River valley. 112 19 Remnants of the ‘coloured’ tennis court. 113 20 Walmer Road and its remnants, 1970–2013. Image on left, Ron Belling, c.1970; image on right, Yusuf Agherdien, 2013. From Double Vision exhibition, 2015.  117 21 One of the main roads through South End, now an internal street in a gated townhouse complex. Image on left, Ron Belling, c.1970; image on right, Yusuf Agherdien, 2013. 118 22 Yusuf Agherdien holds up a mock-up of South End, Then and Now, as he explains the process he uses to locate himself in the remembered landscape. 119 23 View towards the Lee Ching general store. Image on left, Ron Belling, c.1970; image on right, Yusuf Agherdien, 2013. From Double Vision exhibition, 2015. 120 24 The old South End Clinic, now blocked by walls and a car park. Image on left, Ron Belling, c.1970; image on right, Yusuf Agherdien, 2013. 122 25 Yusuf Agherdien in conversation with former residents of South End at the Double Vision exhibition’s first iteration in London. © Catarina Heeckt, 2015. 123 26 Biko graffiti on Strand Street. 132 27 View up Strand Street: Biko House/Sanlam Building is on the corner to the left. 133 28 View towards the street from 44 Strand’s front door. 135 29 Voting Line detail. Anthony Harris and Konrad Geel (2010/2011), laser-cut steel installation. 139 30 View from the flagpole towards the nineteenth-century pyramid and lighthouse, with new mosaic walkway. 140 31 Wall of Texts. Mkhonto Gwazela and Lelethu PoeticSoul Mahambehlala (2011). 142 32 Queen Victoria. John Roscoe Williams (1902), located in Vuyisile Mini Square outside the main public library. 144 33 Emlotheni Heroes’ Acre, viewed through the locked fencing.149 34 Security guard at Coega Vulindlela Village unlocking the memorial to the Cradock Four near Motherwell. 149 35 Biko mural in the Walmer police station, by Nathan Ryan Miller (2007). Photograph © Craig Duffield, 2012. 157

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36 Dinner with Bantu posters on an electricity box in Walmer township, designed by playwright Xolisa Ngubelanga.157 37 Room 619, the interrogation room. 161 38 Amabutho outside the community hall in Langa, Uitenhage, at Human Rights Day commemorations. 168 39 Xolani Kota, former Amabutho leader, stands on the site of a former Amabutho base in Soweto-on-Sea. 184 40 Mrs Mavela’s house in Veeplaas, still in the possession of the Mavela family. 190 41 Mbuyiseli Jam, Xolani Kota and Miki Qakamfanyane at the exit of the storm drain which was used as an escape route in Soweto-on-Sea. 206 42 Locating spaces of memory on a map of Soweto-on-Sea and Veeplaas. 207 43 Oral history workshop with the Legacies of Apartheid Wars Project.211

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Acknowledgements

Nothing happens without community. I have been extraordinarily fortunate to have had the support, assistance, care and love of so many different people while making this book. If I had to name every person whose presence has had a bearing on this work, these acknowledgements would need to be a full chapter on their own: but I trust that you know who you are, and I am beyond grateful to each of you. In particular, this book would not exist without the ongoing support of Annie Coombes. Annie’s insight, warmth and intellectual rigour were crucial to the process of researching and writing this text. I am grateful too for her periodic check-ins that encouraged me not to let this project drop, despite the long road to ­completing it. The research, travel and writing time for this project were ­variously funded by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, the Birkbeck School of Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies, and the French Institute of South Africa. An early research trip that planted the seed for the work was funded by Wits University’s Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies. Space and time to think, consolidate and write between 2015 and 2017 was provided by LSE Cities at the London School of Economics and by the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town (UCT). This work would never have begun, let alone been completed, without this support. There are so many people in Nelson Mandela Bay who gave generously of their time and their expertise via countless hours of interviews, conversations, meals shared, walks, ideas and good humour. Christopher Du Preez was exceptionally supportive of this

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Acknowledgements

work even before I knew what it was going to be. Janet Cherry and Theresa Edlmann invited me to participate in workshops and meetings with the Legacies of Apartheid Wars Project, and I have benefited so much from their deep knowledge of history and passion for building on the past to make better futures. Yusuf Agherdien has become a good friend and co-creator. I am indebted to Colin Abrahams, Manoura Abrahams, Michael Barry, Mary Duker, Gregory George, Lungiswa Gitywa, Mkhonto Gwazela, Albrecht Heroldt, Errol Heynes, Henderson Jacobs, Mbuyiseli Jam, Palesa Kadi, Andile Kondlo, Xolani Kota, Lungelwa Makina, Mzwandile Mgubase, Nontsikelelo Mngadi, Pumla Mngadi-Mntanga, Funeka Lizzy Msizeni, Simphiwe Msizi,  Ismaiel Nakerdien, Mxolisi Ndovane,  Xolisa Ngubelanga, Michael Nicholas, Jo Noero, Ntobeko Qolo, Vuyisile Pandle, Sidney Prince,  Rory Riordan, Dorelle Sapere, Nonceba Shoba, Nomangesi Sitole, Mncedisi Sitoto, Monwabisi Soxuza, Peter Stark, Jimmy Tutu, Pierre Voges, Charmaine Williams, Sheila Wilson, Harold Wilson, Bryan Wintermeyer, Heinrich Wolff, Alan Zinn and so many others who shared their experiences and stories with me. The staff of many institutions in the Eastern Cape have facilitated access to archives and sources and patiently answered endless questions. I am particularly grateful to the staff of the Red  Location Museum of Struggle, the South End Museum, the Arts and Culture Department at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, the NMMU library, the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality, the Mandela Bay Development Agency, the archives of the Eastern Cape Herald and the Port Elizabeth Public Library. I was also generously assisted by members of the Northern Areas History and Heritage Project, the Legacies of Apartheid Wars Project, the New Brighton Concerned Residents Group and the Red Location Women’s Cooperative. Richard Ballard, Carli Coetzee, Shari Daya, Suzanne Hall, Paul Holden, Jeremy Krikler, Kim Miller, Noeleen Murray, Sophie Oldfield, Susan Parnell, Gordon Pirie, Daniel Roux, Brenda Schmahmann, Kate Thompson and Jill Weintroub read and commented on early versions and other iterations of several of these chapters, along with several anonymous reviewers. I am so grateful for all of your insights. For ongoing inspiring discussions and collegiality over the years, I am indebted to Claire Benit-Gbaffou, Sophie

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Acknowledgements xi

Didier, Katharina Fink, Cynthia Kros, Alan Mabin, Edgar Pieterse, Ciraj Rassool, Rike Sitas, Mona Sloane, Shahid Vawda and Leslie Witz, and to all of my colleagues and friends at Wits, Birkbeck, LSE and UCT. Alexandra Gomes at LSE Cities contributed her map-making skills to the Double Vision exhibition project, versions of which appear in this text. Duane Jethro and Rebecca Swartz kept me grounded via the UCT postdoc writing group, where not so much writing always happened but where we forged solidarity in the trenches and did, eventually, get three book manuscripts to show for it. We did it! I would have been lost without Amy Shelver, who gave me a fieldwork home and so much more. Thank you for your no-­ questions-asked hospitality and love, always. Helen Spiropoulos Pearce gracefully and kindly bore the brunt of my dissertationwriting kitchen-table meltdowns. Stuart Theobald provided a couch in London, while Sally Gandar provided a soft landing back in Cape Town … and laughter and acceptance when the landings weren’t so soft. Friends, housemates, officemates, coffeemates and winemates – I don’t have space to name you all here, but please know that I am so grateful to all of you who have been on this expedition with me. The team at Manchester University Press have been a dream to work with throughout the editorial process. Thomas Dark, Lucy Burns and Humairaa Dudhwala have helped me navigate the publication and editorial waters with kindness and efficiency. Maia Vaswani’s eagle-eyed copyediting caught several errors and inconsistencies. My family are my anchors: Catharina, Daniel, Annel and Benjamin, your love carries me always, and has done across so many places and years. Extra thanks to my brother Daniel for giving me the memorable editing note: ‘This sentence is a hideous monster – every time you try kill it, it grows another awful clause.’ Any remaining awful clauses are entirely my own doing. And finally thank you to Samantha, best oddball of my heart, for cheerfully bullying me across my deadlines, daily coffee, silly songs, and for reminding me to play and to rest. I love you and I’m grateful for you every day. Earlier versions of some of the material in this book have appeared in the following publications: ‘Mandela’s Walk and Biko’s Ghosts: Public Art and the Politics of Memory in Port Elizabeth’s City

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Center’ (Chapter 5 in Public Art in South Africa: Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents, edited by Kim Miller and Benda Schmahmann (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017)); ‘A House for Dead People: Memory and Spatial Transformation in Red Location’ (Social & Cultural Geography 19, no. 4 (2018): 407–28); ‘Double Vision and Suspended Conversations: Reconstituting Landscapes of Memory in Port Elizabeth, South Africa’ (Anthropology Southern Africa 42, no. 1 (2019): 59–73). This book is dedicated to the memory of Charlotte Schaer (1946–2012), whose insistence on the value of creativity and the joy and power of imaginative work live on in so many people. Her earliest gifts to me were paper and crayons, and her last was a flight to London to go and register for my doctorate, just six months before she passed. I hope you’d be proud of what those gifts have become.

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Abbreviations

ANC African National Congress AZAPO Azanian People’s Organisation CANRAD Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy COSAS Congress of South African Students DA Democratic Alliance HODS Hands Off District Six LAWS Legacies of Apartheid Wars Project MACWUSA Motor Assembly and Component Workers Union of South Africa MBDA Mandela Bay Development Agency MK uMkhonto weSizwe NAHHP Northern Areas History and Heritage Project NBCR New Brighton Concerned Residents Group NHRA National Heritage Resources Act NUSAS National Union of South African Students PEBCO Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation PECC Port Elizabeth Chamber of Commerce PELCRA Port Elizabeth Land and Community Restoration Association PEWO Port Elizabeth Women’s Organisation PEYCO Port Elizabeth Youth Congress RLM Red Location Museum SACP South African Communist Party SADF South African Defence Force SADRAT Southern Africa Development, Research and Training Institute SASM South African Students’ Movement

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SASO TRC UDF WECAT

Abbreviations South African Students’ Organisation Truth and Reconciliation Commission United Democratic Front Western Cape Action Tours

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Map of Port Elizabeth, Nelson Mandela Bay Metro, indicating case study sites.

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1

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Introduction: The articulated skeleton

The beginning We’re traipsing along yet another suburban street, hemmed in by face-brick walls and electric fences. I’ve spent the morning following Yusuf Agherdien, a writer and heritage activist from the city of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, around his no-longer-existent childhood neighbourhood. We’ve just made a lengthy stop at a construction site for a new apartment block, where Yusuf has befriended the site foreman, convincing him to collect and keep any detritus that comes out of the ground. He stops by once a week or so to collect the most recent treasures. Today we’ve got an old glass bottle, a rusty fragment of an advertising sign and a couple of coins. Next we’re off to somehow charm our way on to the roof of a nearby apartment building to take a photograph from a very precise vantage point; but first, there’s something else that Yusuf wants me to see. Outside yet another residential security complex, Yusuf stops on a triangular stretch of manicured green pavement. I miss it at first, and then I see: two concrete steps, right in the middle of the triangle of grass, coated with the remnants of what was once shiny red enamel paint. The steps end in jagged bare concrete, poking out of the ground like a broken tooth, leading nowhere. Yusuf explains that these used to lead up to the stoep of a corner shop that served the mixed-race, working-class community that lived in this neighbourhood until the 1970s. Under one of apartheid’s most notoriously destructive laws, the Group Areas Act, the neighbourhood of South End was declared ‘White’ in 1968. Twelve thousand people lost homes, businesses and networks as the state forced them to move to new segregated townships and distant suburbs.

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The shop the stairs gesture towards is long gone, demolished at least forty years ago. It’s not clear why they have survived, or how much longer they might remain, given the pace of construction that is quickly obliterating the last remaining traces of the neighbourhood’s past lives. Ivan Vladislavić has described these socalled ‘tomasons’ in the context of Johannesburg, another city that constantly rises and falls with erasure and reconstruction: urban remnants that have stayed in place while the landscape around them has shifted, rendering them obsolete matter-out-of-place as well as markers of memory.1 Objects like these are everywhere in the urban landscape, if you know where to look, or if you are lucky enough to have a guide to point them out. Here’s a line of bricks in the long grass marking the foundations of a house that no longer exists. Over there, a dusty untarred road that seems completely unremarkable, until someone tells you the story of digging a trench across it thirty years ago to catch a police van. Here’s an abandoned office building with a strange piece of graffiti facing towards its broken windows. And then the impressive architectural productions of memory, some of which have already become ruins and remnants: an empty granite memorial that nobody can access. An impressive concrete and iron building, its glass doors darkened and chained, with a hastily scrawled sign in black marker declaring it unequivocally ‘CLOSED’. Up the road from this building, a women’s cooperative has turned the old municipal beer hall into a backpackers’ hostel; decades ago, some of the same women led the crowd that defiantly set the beer hall on fire during the student uprisings of the 1970s. Outwardly, Port Elizabeth – the biggest of the three towns that make up the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro – is a quintessentially ‘ordinary’ city, known primarily for industrial manufacturing and as an unpretentious, family-friendly holiday spot. South Africa’s fourth largest city after Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, it forms a convenient beginning and end point for travellers on the Garden Route down the coast towards Cape Town, and a gateway into the rural Transkei district. Known both as the ‘Windy City’ and as the ‘Friendly City’, Port Elizabeth’s town centre boasts some well-preserved Victorian architecture and a slowly growing arts and culture scene, but it remains unlikely to top visitors’ ‘must-see’ lists. And yet, with a little excavation, it reveals itself to also be an



Introduction 3

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extraordinary, complex site of memory and memorial practice – made all the more compelling by its very ordinariness. The first seeds for this book were planted a decade ago on a visit to the recently opened Red Location Museum of Struggle, in the city’s New Brighton township, in early 2010. I had met the curator, Christopher Du Preez, at a conference hosted by the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town. At this conference I had presented a paper on the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication in Kliptown, Johannesburg, the site where the 1955 Freedom Charter was signed. This event, the Congress of the People, was an extraordinary moment of political solidarity and defiance against the newly instated laws of apartheid. In the early 2000s, the dusty open square in Kliptown was transformed into a huge, formalised open space, complete with a memorial tower, retail space, a covered market, ten massive concrete bollards topped with statues and a five-star hotel (figure 1). But across the railway line, in the ironically named Freedom Charter Square informal settlement, few of the Freedom Charter’s visions of equality and dignity had been realised. ‘There shall be housing, security, and comfort for all’ was inscribed on a concrete wheel under a rarely lit ‘eternal flame’ in the memorial tower: meanwhile, most Kliptown residents lived in shacks and crumbling eighty-year-old houses on the floodplain, with limited electricity, running water and other basic amenities. This irony was not lost on residents, who watched tour buses come and go through the newly built square while day-to-day life in Kliptown continued much as it always had.2 After my presentation, Christopher Du Preez found me at a coffee break, excited that there seemed to be so many parallels between what had happened in Kliptown and the challenges he was facing as the curator of a large new museum in a historically marginalised township community, built at around the same time as the developments in Kliptown. On his invitation, I spent a week in Port Elizabeth a few months later, much of it in and around the Red Location Museum (figure 2). Nelson Mandela Bay boasts some spectacular architectures of memory, both old and new – the Red Location Museum among them – but most striking to me on this and subsequent visits to the city was the extent to which, for many people, memory remained

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Figure 1  Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication, Kliptown, Johannesburg, four years after its construction.

Figure 2  Red Location Museum of Struggle, New Brighton, Port Elizabeth: four years after opening, constructed in the same time period as the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication.

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Introduction 5

so close to the surface and so easily evoked. Many of the stories I heard, directly from residents as well as within formalised museum and memorial spaces, demonstrated how powerfully the lived experiences of memory continued to shape people’s identities and experiences of the city. This is not unique to Port Elizabeth: every city is a space of memory and of multiplicity. The idea of the city as a ‘storehouse for memory’ is well established, as Dolores Hayden’s work on Los Angeles in the 1990s attests.3 Nonetheless, the more time I spent in Nelson Mandela Bay, the more I was intrigued by the extent to which the city’s memory appeared unresolved, unable to stay domesticated in the places designated for it. It spilled out, messy and uncontainable, troubling the curlicued Victorian public buildings and the shiny new public art programmes. The museum in Red Location itself struck me as bizarre – part factory, part architectural folly, part theatre. I could easily see the parallels with Kliptown that Du Preez had noted: it was a brand new, well-funded, tourist-orientated site of memory that was meant to trail ‘development’ and investment in its wake, surrounded by shacks and two-room, state-subsidised cottages. Like Kliptown, the Red Location development appeared to be trying to place the story of New Brighton in the realm of ‘heritage’, while that past and its reverberations continued to unfold literally right on the museum’s doorstep, refusing to be sequestered.

The old-new thing Lalou Meltzer, in an essay about memories of forced removals from the Cape Town suburb of Sea Point, describes the streets of her lost-but-still-extant childhood neighbourhood, which ‘survive as the bones of an articulated skeleton remain preserved’. For Meltzer, the processes of remembering and reading the landscape evoke a sense of piecing the past back together, but this literal ­‘re-membering’ can never be complete: ‘the process of remembering’, Meltzer argues, ‘is filtered and textured, entangling the stages of then and now. It culminates in the evocation of an old-new thing, rather than the “flesh” of what was once there.’4 Meltzer’s evocation serves as a compelling reminder of the paradox of the reconstitution of memory. On the one hand, there

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Remaking the urban

is the drive to remember, to piece together lost landscapes and precarious social relationships, but on the other, the awareness that these can never really be recovered. At best, something new can be created that performs the work of memory. The making of memory and of memorial sites is both an act of preservation and an act of transformation. The ‘articulated skeleton’ refers not only to the tangible streets and houses that evoke memory of what was once here, but also to the ephemeral sense of place that those remembered streets evoke. Even if the remembered space is rebuilt exactly as it was, something crucial has been lost for ever. There is a powerful relationship between memory and space, and particularly urban space, as Meltzer hints in this evocation of landscape-as-skeleton. The double-edged nature of memory – the desire to preserve the old while creating the new, or to reconstitute the past while transforming it – mirrors the process by which urban space is made, transformed, read and experienced. By their nature, cities are changeable, transformative spaces, simultaneously constituted by and constitutive of those who live in them. De Certeau captures this process in his image of the Wandermanner: The ordinary practitioners of the city … whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility … The networks of moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces.5

The stories of loss, remembering, memory-making and placemaking in this book all serve, in different ways, as reflections on the links between these multifaceted processes of making the city and the processes of producing public memory. They also begin to unpack some of the complications that arise in between statesponsored, ‘official’ forms of post-apartheid memory and those that arise organically, or in cases where occluded memory begins to seep into the material fabric of the present. There is, thus, a larger set of questions at play here around the limitations of post-apartheid heritage legislation.

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Introduction 7

The National Heritage Resources Act of 1999 (NHRA) aimed to provide a new legislative framework for heritage and national memory that overturned and offered redress for some of the violence done to memory under apartheid and colonialism. It provided, in theory, a legal framework for memory as an agent of healing, redress, and building new forms of citizenship and belonging.6 To this end, the new legislation set up national and provincial bodies dedicated to the management of heritage and to developing new sites, spaces and institutions. These include the South African Heritage Resources Agency, responsible for managing spaces and resources identified as being of ‘national’ importance, while nine provincial agencies manage heritage at a regional level. Particularly at regional and local levels, heritage tends to be managed and understood in terms of tangible and built resources; despite the optimistic and inclusive framing of the NHRA, it has proven difficult to adequately enable and make space in policy for that which cannot be seen or touched. At the same time, in the immediate aftermath of apartheid the spatial fixity of South African cities and the need to address apartheid geographies of segregation and exclusion became, and remain, major issues in political and public discourse. Heritage and urban transformation are both potential tools for redress as well as highly contested arenas of citizenship and identity; and urban space also acts as a repository for a multi-authored, layered, fragmented ­practice of memory. In Port Elizabeth, as in many other South African cities, the twinned spheres of memory and urban change give rise to tensions between the urge to remake, rebuild and transform on the one hand, and to conserve, remember and keep on the other. In Red Location, for example, while planning for the museum precinct was underway there was pushback from local residents regarding plans to conserve the neighbourhood’s century-old original wood and iron houses. In a built-environment conservation framework, these were seen as an important heritage resource. But to those who lived in and alongside them they were reminders of long histories of systematic marginalisation and painfully inadequate housing and services.7 In South End, meanwhile, unmarked traces of a neighbourhood forcibly removed by the state in the 1970s still litter the landscape, marking traumatic sites of loss that are haunting but

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officially unworthy of legal ‘heritage resource’ status. These remnants are often in the way of new developments and are in constant danger of erasure. How does a city do the work of transformation, when its ordinary places remain haunted? The work of memory and the work of urban transformation both offer opportunities for a politics of ‘dissensus’, in the context of what Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift have termed a potential ‘expanded urban democracy’.8 As a space of difference and inequality, they ask, ‘What better place than the city as a site of contested practices and aspirations, a zone of agonistic engagement, a place of experimentation with democracy as practice?’9 In this regard, they draw on Lefebvre’s concept of the ‘right to the city’, conceptualised as the right of citizens not simply to access the city, but to actively shape its futures.10 These contestations over public space, urban transformation and public memory, then, also open up possibilities for radically democratic practices of space-making and memory-making.

Memory politics There are a plethora of examples across the Eastern Cape, and South Africa more broadly, where the state has failed to effectively drive a genuine post-liberation practice of memory, including at several sites officially designated as ‘heritage’. This is most apparent in the extraordinary number of memorials across the Eastern Cape that have been left abandoned and vandalised without ever attracting sustained audiences or memorial practices, as well as those that have been pre-emptively fenced off and locked up (figure 3). What does it mean to build a site of public memory that the public cannot access? What and who do these sites serve, and what can we infer about questions of public ownership, participation, and the presence and meaning of history in these sites? A lack of well-used memorial space, however, certainly does not translate to an absence of memory or of memorial practice. As many of the interviews and stories in this book demonstrate, memory remains extraordinarily important to Nelson Mandela Bay residents from a wide variety of walks of life. The forced removals of the 1970s and the dramatic conflicts of the 1980s remain extremely close to the surface of lived memory, and their traces are

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Introduction 9

Figure 3  Abandoned memorial to the assassinated Cradock Four activists, Cradock, Eastern Cape.

everywhere, tangible as well as psychic. This book seeks to use the form of the city and these traces to try to understand where meaningful practices of memory are happening, and to explore what this might mean for the ways in which memory makes itself seen and felt in the urban spatial archive. It traces the way that the dynamics of heritage, memory, space and politics have intersected in order to think through the power of urban space to act as a record and representation of the past, and as a site of struggle over the ownership and legacy of that past. The majority of the interviews, site visits and fieldwork research that appear in this text were undertaken between 2012 and 2016. In the intervening years between the development of the project, the research process and this monograph, many of the sites, organisations, political contexts and micropolitics that inform this study have changed, in some cases quite drastically. So why this particular work, with this particular temporal focus, right now? In many respects this book offers a snapshot view of a particular historical moment in South Africa. In the period that this book was being researched and written, the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro experienced an extraordinary amount of political fragmentation,

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instability and infighting. Activist and civil servant Crispian Olver was tasked by Pravin Gordhan, at the time the minister of finance, to ‘clean up’ the city’s local government structures between 2016 and 2017. Olver has likened the political and financial morass in which he found the city to the processes and extent of ‘state capture’ within national government that had begun to come to light around the same time.11 In the 2016 local government elections, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) lost control of the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro to the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA). In this context, the story of how memory has been inscribed in Port Elizabeth’s public spaces is inextricable from its story of post-­apartheid transformation, its challenges and its failures. Fragmentation and inertia at local government level have had a lasting impact on the city’s ability to effectively and collaboratively build heritage. Many of these divisions, deals, and oblique and overt networks of power were already shaping the city at the time that I was undertaking this research, mainly between 2011 and 2015. Events in Port Elizabeth in this period were, of course, linked to a much larger context, including (but also predating) the ousting of President Thabo Mbeki by Jacob Zuma and his supporters within the ANC in 2007. Beyond the specifics of local politics in Nelson Mandela Bay, this second decade of the twenty-first century saw a number of seismic shifts in South African society, and indeed across the globe. The Marikana Massacre at the Lonmin platinum mine in 2012 left forty-seven people dead, evoking for many memories of the violence enacted by police and security forces against protesting citizens at Sharpeville in 1960, Soweto in 1976 and Uitenhage in 1985, and several other moments of violent trauma that have shaped the South African memorial imaginary.12 Jacob Zuma had at that point been in power for five years, in the midst of multiple allegations of corruption and bribery linked to the notorious arms deal of the late 1990s. Paul Holden and Hennie van Vuuren published a damning and thorough account of the arms deal process and related coverups, The Devil In The Detail, in 2011;13 this was three years before the Zuma-appointed Seriti Commission finally began holding hearings into the arms deal in a process widely decried as biased, politicised and unreliable. Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s report on ‘state capture’, soon to be a buzzword across South African

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Introduction 11

dinner tables, social media and news, was finally published in 2016 after concerted attempts by the Zuma administration to have it suppressed.14 In many ways, this was the period in which ideas about the ‘rainbow nation’ and post-apartheid national fantasies of ‘reconciliation’, predicated on symbolic justice, began to irretrievably fall apart. As the extent of the ‘dream deferred’ became clearer, to adapt Mark Gevisser’s use of Langston Hughes’ term, a sense of disillusionment took hold across seemingly all sectors of South African society.15 By 2015 this disillusionment had spilled into rage, as students across the country embarked on weeks of protest under the banner ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and, later, ‘Fees Must Fall’ – catalysed by student Chumani Maxwele’s act of throwing human faeces over a statue of Cecil John Rhodes that had gazed from the imposing steps in front of the University of Cape Town towards the Cape Flats since the 1920s. Rhodes’ statue was removed, and the plinth he once sat on was boarded up: not too long after, a painted shadow appeared sprayed across the steps, a reminder that although the statue was gone, Rhodes’ legacies and all they stood for were not. The Rhodes Must Fall movement (and its global iterations, particularly in the UK and the United States) has led to a renewed sense of urgency to rethink what kinds of historical symbols appear in public spaces, and how the public remnants of dark or traumatic histories might best be addressed.16 In the August 2016 local government elections, the ANC lost control of three of its key metropolitan strongholds for the first time since 1994: Johannesburg and Tshwane in Gauteng, and Nelson Mandela Bay in the Eastern Cape. The losses in Gauteng were a major political upset, including the economic hub of Johannesburg and the nation’s capital, Tshwane (Pretoria). The loss of Nelson Mandela Bay, meanwhile, was a profoundly symbolic one. The Eastern Cape has historically been the heartland of ANC support and the birthplace of much of its leadership, as well a hotbed of struggle and apartheid-era resistance. In New Brighton in Port Elizabeth, the very first actions of the Defiance Campaign – a programme of passive resistance to the segregationist laws of ‘petty’ apartheid – took place in Red Location in 1952, led by struggle stalwart, later Rivonia trialist and, even later, the first post-apartheid premier of the Eastern Cape, Raymond Mhlaba. Steve Biko was

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Remaking the urban

imprisoned and received the injuries that would kill him in the security police headquarters in an unremarkable building in the middle of Port Elizabeth in 1977. The townships of Veeplaas and Sowetoon-Sea burnt with rage and resistance in the late 1970s and 1980s, as the activists known as the ‘young lions’ tried – successfully – to make the townships ‘ungovernable’. Many of the leaders at the helm of the struggle against apartheid were born in and around Port Elizabeth, and elsewhere in the Eastern Cape: Raymond Mhlaba, Govan Mbeki, Ernest Malgas, Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, to name just a few. So it was not at all surprising that in the first democratic elections of 1994, the ANC won an overwhelming 84% of the provincial vote in the Eastern Cape, netting forty-eight out of a possible fifty-six provincial seats. But twenty-five years later, in 2019, this support had declined to just over 68%. In Port Elizabeth, Nceba Faku became the city’s first black mayor in 1995 and maintained a clear majority above 65% in the city council in 2000 and 2006. Things began to slip in 2011, when the ANC only just managed to maintain a simple majority with 52% of votes in the Metro; and 2016 brought the historic loss to the opposition, the DA, with the ANC garnering 41.5% of the vote against the DA’s 46.7%. Clearly, in that decade between 2006 and 2016, something had gone seriously awry for the ruling party on its own home ground. A detailed analysis of the political machinations, factions and failures of this period is beyond the scope of this book. My interest, however, is in what all this has meant for the making of memory and the inscription of heritage in the city, and associated ideas of nationhood, belonging, identity, resistance and subversion. At the exact moment that local leadership was fragmenting and the national psyche was coming face to face with its intractable, unburied skeletons, a host of projects and plans were underway for public inscriptions of memory and heritage-making in Nelson Mandela Bay. Some of these were ‘official’, state-driven, spectacular showcase projects, while others emerged from grassroots processes with minimal support or structure; or from activist processes in which memory was not seen as the primary thing at stake, although it was nevertheless being harnessed for the purposes of the present. The fortunes of the most well-known and documented project covered in this book, the Red Location Museum, can be mapped



Introduction 13

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on to the political vagaries of Nelson Mandela Bay’s leadership, from its inception in the heady moments of the mid-1990s to its eventual completion in 2006 and its closure in 2013. These timings are not coincidental or accidental, but reveal something important about the work that both collective memory and heritage-making do in the present – and what kinds of futures are imagined by such projects.

Making and breaking: Activist memory The history of Port Elizabeth – and of the Nelson Mandela Bay metropole, and indeed the Eastern Cape as a whole – is inextric­ able from a history of activism. The city has been shaped by a long series of ‘insurgent architects’,17 as a landscape forged through and marked by dispossession, warfare, resistance and retaliation. Between 1779 and 1879 nine ‘Frontier Wars’ were fought between the British and the Xhosa, in the course of which Xhosa-speaking and other indigenous people were dispossessed of land and livelihoods and British control extended into the Cape interior. These wars left behind a powerful legacy of resistance, but were also a crucible for British colonial policy, forming legislation, attitudes and imperial policies later exported to other Southern and East African colonies.18 In 1799 the settlement that would grow into the city of Port Elizabeth started life as a British military garrison called Fort Frederick, the ruins of which remain in the city centre as a protected heritage site. With the arrival of thousands of British settlers from 1820, encouraged with promises of land and financial support to start new lives in the colony, Fort Frederick expanded into a small port town. It was named Port Elizabeth after the late wife of its first governor, Rufane Donkin. The city grew rapidly through the nineteenth century, becoming an important port city: at one point, its port actually surpassed Cape Town’s in size and activity.19 Rapid urbanisation was driven both by a growing settler population and by migrations from the Eastern Cape hinterland resulting from the displacements of war, drought, the imposition of new taxes and the infamous cattle killings of 1856–1857.20 The city bears the spatial traces of successive waves of forced removal and displacement, and attempts by colonial and a­ partheid

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Remaking the urban

governments to contain its African population. British racial policy in the nineteenth century was predicated on the creation of ‘native reserves’ on the outskirts of the city. In the city, the Native Strangers’ Location was built in 1855, followed by nearby Cooper’s Kloof and several others. As the city expanded, these locations were periodically moved to ensure that they remained peripheral to the city centre. This meant that the patterns of segregation were being laid down in the city very early in its history, despite the paternalistic liberalism that the city council would later espouse regarding its responsibilities towards its black urban population.21 By 1910 Port Elizabeth already had one of the most stringently segregated urban populations in the country – well before the implementation of apartheid land policies or the advent of the 1913 Land Act.22 But, nonetheless, the legacy of the nineteenth century Wars of Dispossession translated into powerful continued practices of resistance and defiance.23 Between 1901 and 1905, an outbreak of bubonic plague across the country led to the final destruction of almost all the remaining urban ‘locations’ in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Durban. Under the auspices of public health policy, they were cleared of residents and burnt to the ground. People of colour living in city centres were moved to what would later become racially circumscribed urban townships. In the first half of the twentieth century, residential urban segregation was entrenched through a series of new laws, often predicated on racially defined public-health anxieties as well as on paternalistic public-housing policies. These included the 1919 Public Health Act and the 1920 Public Housing Act, both in the wake of the 1918–1919 global influenza epidemic; the 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act; and the 1934 Slums Act. Thus, the seeds of apartheid residential segregation were laid – in Port Elizabeth as well as other urban centres – well before the National Party came into power on an apartheid platform in 1948.24 From the 1920s, an aggressive marketing and investment campaign by the Port Elizabeth city council supported the growth of a powerful and competitive manufacturing industry. As a result of its position as both a port city and a burgeoning industrial town, with a relatively settled African population (in comparison with the migrant labour system at work in the mines of the Vaal), Port Elizabeth developed a powerful trade union movement. The trade

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Introduction 15

unions and labour movements would become immensely important to twentieth century political resistance and mobilisation, and would fundamentally shape the character of work and resistance in the city. References to ‘the Liverpool of the Cape’25 and the ‘Detroit of South Africa’26 indicate how important industry has been to the city’s formation and its character. The pressures of globalisation and specifically the decline in the car manufacturing industry from the 1980s have been particularly hard on the city and those who live and work there. By the 1980s, strong networks of resistance and underground mobilisation had developed in Port Elizabeth and the nearby town of Uitenhage. This was a turbulent and violent time in all South African urban townships, as popular resistance exploded and state oppression grew increasingly brutal. These histories of resistance remain close to the surface of living memory and continue to reproduce themselves via exceptionally high levels of political participation and popular organisation, as Janet Cherry has shown in her excellent and carefully historicised study of political participation in Port Elizabeth’s Kwazakele township.27 Thus, questions of memory and its representations in Nelson Mandela Bay are not simply theoretical. They remain integral to residents’ experiences of day-to-day life, rendering the city a productive site for analysing the ways in which such memories appear and disappear in an urban space in a state of flux. In quite a literal sense, then, histories of activism are central to any understanding of the politics of memory and public culture in Nelson Mandela Bay. But in a more figurative sense, contemporary activism in and around the city has played out in the realm of heritage too. This book focuses on four different arenas of memory production in Nelson Mandela Bay: these are all fundamentally different ‘realms’ of memory,28 but a common thread between all of the sites discussed here is that they represent activist histories, have evoked activist responses or have been established through activist processes. In some cases, this activism has been overt and directly political: for example, popular mobilisation leading to the closure of a flagship cultural centre, or an activist group carrying its banner and performing struggle songs on the doorstep of ‘official’ events on days of remembrance. But other actions and interventions also fall under the ambit of activist memory-making. For example, student

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Remaking the urban

arts-and-culture groups draw on Steve Biko’s writings and Black Consciousness philosophy to propose new ways of reading the present, while a municipal worker who is also a writer and curator produces tiny localised museum spaces and self-published texts that make visible a deeply personal memory subtly embedded in the landscape. All of these events and case studies are, at their core, iterative processes of making – and this ephemeral, process-led way of making memories and futures is often in stark contrast with officially driven processes of producing, or delivering a ‘product’ of memory in the form of a building, a statue or a monument. A core theme throughout this book is the relationship between product and process, and the extent to which the occluded meanings of these monumental memorials often make themselves felt only ephemerally in practice, through their contestation or appropriation.29 In 2001, the formerly separate municipal entities of Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage and Despatch were brought together as the newly formed Nelson Mandela Bay metropolitan area, with a unified council responsible for all three towns. A great deal of work has gone into rebranding the city around the Nelson Mandela name, driven by Nelson Mandela Bay Tourism and the Nelson Mandela Bay Development Agency (MBDA; the city’s development arm, which has led several public art and urban redesign projects in the city). But this foregrounding of Mandela as central to notions of reconciliation, forgiveness and the ‘rainbow nation’ have cracked the occlusions of this positioning wide open, in an era where ‘born free’ student activists have compellingly drawn attention to failure of the promises of the ‘rainbow nation’ era. Increasingly, it is becoming clear just how extensively the ruinations of apartheid continue to reproduce themselves in public space and in day-to-day life.30 The meaning of ‘reconciliation’ without a concomitant process of justice and meaningful material redress, particularly around land and ownership of the economy, remains a central pressure point. Again, it is clear that the questions raised by the Port Elizabeth examples explored here are not just theoretical. In many instances, symbols of the past and places of memory have become catalysts or platforms for profound and poignant expressions of the extent to which these painful histories remain unresolved. This is particularly salient in a context where issues around land, restitution



Introduction 17

and ongoing processes of decolonisation are becoming increasingly central to public cultural debates.

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Urban memory and spatial archives The second point of departure for this text is the notion of urban space as a form of archive. Archivists and archives take many forms, and the contemporary politics of memory and urban transformation demand an acknowledgement of a multiplicity of voices and narratives that, in some cases quite literally, have shaped the city and its memories. Artistic and collaborative interventions in this archive and in public space often surface more complex readings of political realities, power relations and future imaginaries than can be achieved through a purely historiographical, technical or governance-led approach.31 The silences of ‘official’ archives are well documented, as is the need to read between the lines of the archives in order to understand how they produce knowledge and validate particular forms of collective memory.32 The call to ‘refigure the archive’ has been made for some time, but the processes of doing so remain (necessarily) messy and incomplete.33 Carolyn Hamilton and colleagues have usefully unpacked the nuances of archival politics, in p ­ articular the extent to which archiving as a process of documenting and recalling is also a process of producing the past. Constructing an archive involves editing and selection, and so the process of making memory through the archive is also a process of forgetting – one that is always informed by the politics of memory and by power relations. There has been growing consciousness in the literature that the archive is not a neutral or objective container of ‘facts’, but is only one of many possible sources for narratives about the past. Increasingly, the oral record has been used by researchers to locate and add ‘missing’ voices to the archival record. This, however, comes with its own problems and occlusions, and remains a selective process of producing and editing.34 Oral history is also only a partial record, and is also one susceptible to being framed by the researcher or interviewer: the idea of ‘recovering’ missing, lost or unheard voices is problematic in its own way. In South Africa,

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Remaking the urban

oral-history research has been strongly influenced by the field of social and radical history, where much of the groundwork was laid for the now-burgeoning field of South African memory studies from the late 1970s onwards.35 Bozzoli and Delius have identified a paradigm shift in South African historical studies in the late 1960s, in which colonial and pre-colonial history was recast in ‘terms of the strident and confident neo-Marxism of the time’ and new frames of analysis and sets of questions were developed for the reading of histories of colonialism and apartheid.36 This shift followed a period during the 1960s which saw an intensification of state repression inside the country, while many intellectuals and academics went into exile. The atmosphere in the South African academy at this time was in marked contrast to the growing postcolonial intellectual movements in the rest of the African continent, and the growth of ‘African studies’ as a field in European and North American universities.37 Yet, by the late 1960s, the influence of exiled historians and those who had left to study abroad, as well as the development of African studies outside the country, was being felt in the South African historical academy. These shifts and the seismic political events of the 1970s contributed to what Bozzoli and Delius read as the ­‘reinvigoration’ of the historical disciplines in South Africa.38 This was also the period in which the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand was established in 1977, a space which would remain at the intellectual forefront of radical and social history in the South African academy throughout the 1980s and beyond, along with the History Department at the University of the Western Cape.39 This historiographical tradition was influential in the development of the ways in which public and popular history were understood and worked with, both inside and outside the academy, in the 1980s and 1990s. Luli Callinicos has linked the development of ‘popular history’ in the late 1970s and 1980s to the growth of the independent labour movements which followed the Durban general strikes of 1973. In the 1970s, for example, workers’ publications such as the Durban-based Abasebenzi (‘The Workers’) began to publish short history pieces in isiZulu.40 Members of the History Workshop also contributed to a series of articles in the radical newspaper New Nation.41 Elsewhere, Callinicos has noted that

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Introduction 19

history was utilised by movements across the political spectrum as a tool of mobilisation and pedagogy throughout the 1980s.42 In this intellectual context, oral history methodology developed as an important approach in South African historiography during the late 1970s and 1980s.43 Oral histories provided an opportunity to inscribe everyday experience and the histories and biographies of ‘ordinary’ people into a historical record dominated by ‘official’ and state archives which elided as much as they revealed. While there were legitimate criticisms to be made of the ways oral history was used by academic historians, it remains an enormously influential methodology and played an important role in the development of public history in the 1990s in the aftermath of apartheid.44 Globally, meanwhile, memory studies emerged as a burgeoning discipline through the second half of the twentieth century, including a great deal of enormously influential work on holocaust memory and on collective memory more generally.45 The establishment of UNESCO after World War 2 produced new international policies and frameworks for managing heritage in the built environment, archaeological sites and, from the 1970s, ‘intangible heritage’. These developments were supported by the emergence of the notion of ‘heritage’ as a dedicated area of study and analysis, including university departments and degrees focused on heritage studies and what has come to be called ‘critical heritage’.46 In South Africa after 1994, as the country grappled with how to manage collective memories and experiences of a profoundly violent and oppressive past, heritage became a key area of identity formation as well as a politicised site of nation-building. These processes were, of course, not unique to South Africa. Many postcolonial and post-conflict states, on the continent and further afield, have grappled with similar politics and issues.47 In an era where multiple new, often large-scale and well-funded heritage and memory projects were going up all over the country, important debates and analyses emerged about the relationship of heritage to power and to identity politics in the post-apartheid state, as well as vital discussions about the role of ‘community museums’ and the perpetually unfinished work of recalling traumatic collective histories.48 In a country where traumatic segregation and forced displacement were such a powerful hallmark of the apartheid state, urban

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Remaking the urban

space and specific neighbourhoods are key sites of memory as well of heritage-making. Iconic neighbourhoods like District Six and Sophiatown have received a great deal of attention as they are inscribed into the language of ‘heritage’, while increasing attention is turning to heritage and memory space in South African urban townships.49 The city itself – its shape, its streets, its dividing lines and borderlands – is a crucial space of memory, a dispersed and spatialised archive.50 This book participates in this conversation through a range of approaches to the spatialisation of urban memory in a post-­ apartheid city, and through considering the ways in which occluded or obscured forms of memory-making insist on visibility, often in creative, unexpected or subversive ways. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between heritage, memory and spatiality in the South African city, and the function of urban space as both a site of heritage-making and a locus of collective memory. While this book has been written on the back of research in the ‘official’ archives, insofar as these have been accessible – not always a simple process, particularly where accessing municipal archives has been involved – I am less concerned with mining the archives for what Hamilton et al call ‘nuggets of fact’,51 and rather with understanding what spaces of history in the city mean to those who interact with them day to day, or who have shaped these spaces in ways sometimes entirely outside of ‘official’ processes. De Certeau suggests the metaphor of multiple moving bodies and everyday practices ‘writing’ the city’s meanings, to create a layered set of meanings for space – or what Huyssen has called ‘urban palimpsests’.52 These are the everyday practices which, in a very real way, shape both the materiality of urban spaces and residents’ experiences of those spaces. In this sense, the city itself functions as a kind of archive. Those histories of displacement, segregation and attempts at erasure have all, in some way, left traces behind that can still be accessed – sometimes overtly, simply by looking at the outline of a map; and sometimes in hidden or submerged ways that require the presence of an interpreter to make them legible. In the course of this book, I tease out some of these moments where the urban archive makes itself visible, and some of the processes by which it might be accessed. This is, in part, a project about the politics of knowledge and of expertise. Who is the historian, the historical expert or the

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Introduction 21

s­ toryteller? This is another thread that holds the book together as it journeys through space, time and memory in Nelson Mandela Bay: the consciousness that the architect, the academic researcher, the archivist, the property developer, the urban designer or the curator might be framed as experts, but much knowledge and expertise are lost in this framing. This applies to the formation of documentary archives as well. It is impossible not to be moved by the small but rich archives that emerge from under people’s beds and from the backs of cupboards. Extraordinary photographs, drawings, maps, letters and documents, stashed in shoeboxes and suitcases, often tell quite a different story to those kept in official repositories.

Memorial architectures The third interpretive lens at work in this book is that of architecture and design. David Harvey’s characterisation of ‘insurgent architects’ is crucial here, both as part of a discussion about who has the right to materially shape the city and build public memory, and also within a critique of the supposed power of architecture and  design to achieve socially just ends. As Lindsay Bremner has pointed out, the post-apartheid period has been ‘unexpectedly productive’ for South African architects engaged in the making of new public buildings, producing what Steven Dubin has wryly termed a ‘distinctive vernacular’ for memorial architecture shaped by a handful of architectural firms.53 It is true that post-apartheid public memory has been shaped by architects to a significant extent. Many of these architectural sites of memory have become iconic in the South African design lexicon.54 The Constitution Hill complex in Johannesburg is one of the most well known of these sites: here, the new Constitutional Court building was constructed out of the debris of the old awaiting-trial prisoners’ block in one of Johannesburg’s most notorious prisons. The highest court in South Africa, tasked with interpreting what is often referred to as the most liberal constitution in the world, shares space with a prison museum built within a nineteenth-century fortress. A little way north, in Pretoria, Freedom Park offers a set of architectural interpretations of former president Thabo Mbeki’s evocation of the ‘African Renaissance’, to create a memorial

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Remaking the urban

l­andscape intended to evoke a generically ‘African’ spirituality and to honour the dead of centuries of colonial and apartheid wars. In Kliptown, the developments in the old Freedom Square were meant not only to honour the area’s past but also to serve as the centre of gravity for a large-scale urban redevelopment project, and a similar approach was taken in Red Location, as I explore in depth in the chapter that follows. The idea that architect-led heritage design drives urban development, with the ultimate goal of addressing exclusion, poverty and inequality, is deeply entrenched. Jennifer Robinson has argued, using the case study of early twentieth-century colonial Port Elizabeth, for an understanding of apartheid as an inherently spatialised system, in which the power of the state was enforced and reproduced via the uses and circumscriptions of physical space.55 Spatialised expressions of ­ power found their most rigid and formalised expression in the 1950 Group Areas Act, but, Robinson argues, have a much longer provenance predating legislated apartheid. She demonstrates this via a close reading of the ‘location strategy’ in Port Elizabeth, a colonial system of spatial control of black urban residents which remained in place until the New Brighton Riots of 1952. In the city, then, spaces of memory are often also historic spaces of oppression, many of which remain economically and socially marginalised. The form of the city itself – as a spatial archive – is a mnemonic for histories of repression, segregation and violence, and the work of mitigating these histories includes the work of remaking urban space.56 In South African cities, the importance of finding new ways of making urban space and redressing these entrenched inequalities has powerfully informed both urban policy and design practice, and necessarily so. However, it has also meant that in many instances the work of development has been effectively framed as primarily a design problem, and the results of this approach have generally left much to be desired. This is certainly not to argue that there is no role for architecture and design to have a very real and lasting social–material impact. But, as many of the cases examined in this book and elsewhere suggest, there are serious limitations to the inherent ability of architecture to solve entrenched social problems, or to dissolve historic boundaries that remain keenly felt and experienced. Design is one of a number of tools for spatial remaking and social t­ ransformation,

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Introduction 23

but its impact is limited without the presence of other kinds of energies and interventions. The bricks-and-mortar structures of memory cannot function unless they support some form of memorial practice; and fostering new practices of doing and being simply on the back of design interventions – no matter how award-winning – is, it turns out, incredibly difficult. While intentions at the outset may have been ambitiously transformative, the Red Location Museum case is a prime example of the pitfalls of this kind of architectural hubris. In the same way that the archive might take many forms and adopt varying levels of visibility and official valorisation, there is also a range of sanctioned and unsanctioned architectures of memory. In many instances, as I explore through this book, some of the most important work of memory takes place completely unmoored from the architectural containers ascribed to it. In many cases, as I discuss in chapter 3 on memories of forced removals and chapter 5 on the collective memory of the Amabutho, there is little or no ‘official’ tangible representation of memory – and yet its practices persist, surfacing in unexpected ways and writing themselves into public urban space through embodied action. These unexpected, everyday or unsanctioned memorial architectures and practices can be related to the architectural and planning concept of ‘desire lines’, in the sense in which Noëleen Murray et al use the term.57 In planning terminology, a desire line or desire path is a pathway established by pedestrians as the quickest route between two points, deviating from planned but less efficient routes. These often make themselves visible in footpaths worn in the grass, eschewing formal structures like bridges or paved walkways, leaving behind the traces of a thousand feet where no pathway was intended to be. The desire line is ‘the space between the planned and the providential, the engineered and the “lived”, and between official projects of capture and containment and the popular energies which subvert, bypass, supersede and evade them’.58 These lines between ‘official projects’ and ‘popular energies’ are of course often blurred, and inform each other; but the metaphor is a useful one for the framing of this book, in which I am particularly interested in the ways in which these structures and processes coexist or, in many instances, undercut and subvert one another.

24

Remaking the urban

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Sites of memory in Nelson Mandela Bay The book uses four examples to examine the intersections between memory, heritage and urban transformation in Nelson Mandela Bay. The next chapter sets the scene with a detailed analysis of the contestations in and around the Red Location Museum of Struggle and its associated ‘cultural precinct’. As a place where contestations over space, memory and urban remaking have played out with particular intensity, this site is particularly important to a discussion of contemporary political changes and struggles that have impacted on the appearance of memory and history in the public realm. The Red Location Museum of Struggle formed an important part of the city’s first transitional council’s attempts to symbolically and functionally unify a city deeply marred by legacies of spatial segregation. The museum was intended to honour the histories of the oldest section of New Brighton township, a place that has been fundamentally shaped by histories of resistance and mobilisation since its founding in 1902. At the time the project was initiated in 1998, there were no museums in any South African townships. This was consequently not only a project about acknowledging formerly suppressed and painful pasts, but also about beginning to shift the locus of cultural production and urban heritage out of the formerly ‘white’ city centre and into the township. While the museum building itself has received numerous architectural and design awards, the Red Location project has been mired in controversy from the start. Construction took an inordinately long time to begin and to be completed, as residents halted the process in the face of broken promises and urgent unmet needs for dignified housing and services. The museum opened in 2006 and two new buildings, an art gallery and library, were constructed a few years later. However, the precinct was entirely shut down following renewed residents’ protests in late 2013. Despite efforts from multiple city councils and periodic newspaper announcements that a reopening is imminent, negotiations stalled and the museum remains closed at the time of writing, nearly seven years later. Chapter 2 traces this history as a compelling example of the postapartheid ‘memory-boom’ and its entanglement with local politics,

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Introduction 25

patronage networks, and contestations over the ownership and use of local memory and heritage. While the Red Location example serves as a case study of an ‘official’ project of memory that has become mired in political fragmentation and spatial contestation, there are also many smaller, community-driven projects and practices of memory that are useful counterpoints. Memories of apartheid-era forced removals have found their way into the city’s history through community projects with little support from the state or the city. The most established of these is the South End Museum, which commemorates the removal of approximately twelve thousand people from a city centre neighbourhood under the Group Areas Act in the 1970s. However, South End is only one part of the story: forced removals have taken place from the city in various iterations since the nineteenth century, and people in many parts of the city were affected not only by the Group Areas Act but also earlier segregationist and ‘slum clearance’ legislation. Chapter 3 examines the ‘community museum’ as a carrier of memory, but also looks at the extent to which that memory is activated through other means – by animating physical traces in the landscape, through storytelling, walking and photography. In the context of reinvigorated debates around public symbolism and the narratives around collective ‘heroes’ in South African public culture, chapter 4 addresses public art as an alternative realm for the inscription of history into the urban landscape. This chapter considers the possibilities for public art – whether monumental or ephemeral – to act as a point of access to the city-as-archive, and what the politics are of these kinds of public representations and contestations. But what about memories for which there is little or no space in the public realm at all? The final facet of memory to which I turn here is the example of the Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho, in the fifth chapter. The Amabutho are a group of former youth activists who were responsible for ‘making the city ungovernable’ during the political turbulence and state repression of the 1980s. This was a quasi-military organisation, made up largely of teenage boys and young men, which was active in the Eastern Cape’s townships from 1984 to 1988. In 2007, the Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho established a new activist organisation agitating for material and symbolic ­recognition of the role they played in destabilising the apartheid state.

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This is a morally ambiguous and violent history that does not fit neatly into standard heroic narratives of struggle and overcoming. The Amabutho identify themselves as soldiers in the ‘last war against Apartheid’, and indeed their actions were extremely successful in destabilising state security forces. However, they were also perpetrators of violence, employing often brutal methods of dealing with people who broke consumer boycotts, or who were suspected of being ‘collaborators’ or informers. This case study, more than any other in the book, interrogates the question of what happens to memory politics in cases where there is no physical space or material representation of this past, and where social and cultural space for its expression is limited. Ultimately, this history of the Amabutho and other vigilante anti-apartheid groups like them remains an unacknowledged scar in South African urban liberation history. Yet, these stories insist on being made visible, and for those who lived this history the city streets remain powerful if unmarked mnemonics for this past. This history continues to come to the surface in unexpected and embodied ways. Twenty-odd years after the end of apartheid, in a context where the ebullient discourses of unity, reconciliation and nation-building which informed much of the emergent practices of public memory in the 1990s and early 2000s have largely receded, what role does public memory and heritage play in South Africa? Although understandings and debates in the arena of heritage have shifted, heritage and memory continue to function as tools of urban transformation and urban governance. As the Nelson Mandela Bay case studies indicate, questions around memory, representation and acknowledgement remain deeply contested and emotive, linked to issues of restitution and the power to participate in the making of the city’s futures.

Notes  1 Ivan Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys: Joburg and What-What (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2006).   2 Hilton Judin, Naomi Roux and Tanya Zack, ‘Kliptown: Resilience and Despair in the Face of a Hundred Years of Planning’, in Changing Space, Changing City: Johannesburg after Apartheid, ed. Philip Harrison

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Introduction 27

et al. (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2014), 319–41; Christa Kuljian, ‘The Congress of the People and the Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication: From Public Deliberation to Bureaucratic Imposition in Kliptown’, Social Dynamics 35, no. 2 (2009): 450–64.  3 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).   4 Lalou Meltzer, ‘Past Streets’, in Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating and Curating the District Six Museum, ed. Ciraj Rassool and Sandra Prosalendis (Cape Town: District Six Museum Foundation, 2001), 21–22.  5 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 58.  6 Lynn Meskell and Colette Scheermeyer, ‘Heritage as Therapy: Set Pieces from the New South Africa’, Journal of Material Culture 13, no. 2 (2008): 153–73.   7 Stephen Townsend produced a thorough conservation plan and ‘statement of significance’ for these cottages, although they collapsed before this could be implemented. His recommendation, in terms of the National Heritage Resources Act, was that the buildings were highly significant markers of New Brighton and Port Elizabeth’s history and should be preserved as, in his terms, ‘numinous relics’. See Stephen Townsend, ‘Numinous Relics: Recovering Ruins at Red Location. A Report Prepared on a Proposal to Conserve Some Wood and Iron Houses at Red Location, New Brighton for the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality’, 2008.  8 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010); Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).   9 Amin and Thrift, Cities, 140. 10 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso Books, 2012); Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Right to the City’, in Henri Lefebvre: Writings on Cities, ed. Eleanore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 11 Crispian Olver, How to Steal a City: The Battle for Nelson Mandela Bay (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2017). 12 For detailed accounts of Marikana and its aftermaths, see Peter Alexander, Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2013), and Greg Marinovich, Murder at a Small Koppie: The Real Story of the Marikana Massacre (Cape Town: Penguin Books, 2016). 13 Paul Holden and Hennie Van Vuuren, The Devil in the Detail: How the Arms Deal Changed Everything (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2011).

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14 Thulisile Nomkhosi Madonsela, State of Capture (Pretoria: Office of the Public Protector, 2016). 15 Mark Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007). 16 Kim Miller and Brenda Schmahmann, ‘Introduction: Engaging with Public Art in South Africa, 1999–2015’, in Public Art in South Africa: Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents, ed. Miller and Schmahmann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), vii–xxxviii; Francis B. Nyamnjoh, #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa Research and Publishing, 2016). 17 David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 18 Clifton Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 19 Alan Mabin, ‘The Rise and Decline of Port Elizabeth, 1850–1900’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 19, no. 2 (1986): 275–303. 20 Jennifer Robinson, The Power of Apartheid: State, Power, and Space in South African Cities (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996). For a detailed historiographical account of the cattle killings, an economic and social disaster for the Xhosa driven by the prophet Nongqawuse, see Jeffrey B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989). 21 Joyce F. Kirk, ‘Race, Class, Liberalism, and Segregation: The 1883 Native Strangers’ Location Bill in Port Elizabeth, South Africa’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 24, no. 2 (2011): 293–321. 22 Robinson, Power of Apartheid. 23 Joyce F. Kirk, Making a Voice: African Resistance to Segregation in South Africa (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000). 24 Susan Parnell, ‘Creating Racial Privilege: The Origins of South African Public Health and Town Planning Legislation’, Journal of Southern African Studies 19, no. 3 (1993): 471–88; Susan Parnell, ‘Race, Power and Urban Control: Johannesburg’s Inner City Slum-Yards, 1910–1923’, Journal of Southern African Studies 29, no. 3 (2003): 615–37. 25 Mabin, ‘Rise and Decline’, 275. 26 Gary Baines, A History of New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 1903–1953: The Detroit of the Union (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2002), 11.

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Introduction 29

27 Janet Cherry, ‘The Politics of Transition in South Africa: An Eastern Cape Case Study’ (PhD thesis, Rhodes University, 2000). 28 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7–24. 29 I am grateful to Suzanne Hall for a useful conversation about this relationship between process and product, which has informed this analysis. 30 Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 31 Rike Sitas, ‘Becoming Otherwise: Artful Urban Enquiry’, Urban Forum 31 (2020): 157–75. 32 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 33 Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh, eds, Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2002). 34 Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool, ‘Orality, Memory and Social History in South Africa’, in Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, ed. Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 89–99. 35 For an overview of the development of radical history in South Africa, see Belinda Bozzoli and Peter Delius, ‘Radical History and South African Society’, Radical History Review, nos 46–47 (1990): 13–45. See also Shula Marks, ‘The Historiography of South Africa: Recent Developments’, in African Historiographies: What History for Which Africa, ed. Bogumil Jewsiewicki and David S. Newbury (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1986), 165–76. 36 Bozzoli and Delius, ‘Radical History’, 19. 37 Bozzoli and Delius, 18. 38 Bozzoli and Delius, 28. 39 For a summation of the work and contribution of the Wits History Workshop, see Philip Bonner, ‘New Nation, New History: The History Workshop in South Africa, 1977–1994’, Journal of American History 81, no. 3 (1994): 977–85. 40 Luli Callinicos, ‘Popular History in the Eighties’, Radical History Review, nos 46–47 (1990): 285–97. 41 Bonner, ‘New Nation, New History’. These were later published as History Workshop, New Nation, New History (Johannesburg: Wits History Workshop, 1989). 42 Luli Callinicos, ‘Popularising History in a Changing South Africa’, South African Historical Journal 25, no. 1 (1991): 22–37. Within this

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tradition, for example, Callinicos published the two-volume Gold and Workers: A People’s History of South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1981). This is an account of South African labour and political history intended to be accessible to a wide audience, analysing systems of worker control, wage labour, the development of mining compounds, and the growth of workers’ mobilisation and resistance. Jeremy Cronin and Raymond Suttner’s Thirty Years of the Freedom Charter (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1986), celebrating and documenting the mass movements of the 1950s, can also be read within this tradition. 43 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology (Chicago: Routledge, 1965); Paul La Hausse, ‘Oral History and South African Historians’, Radical History Review, nos 46–47 (1990): 346–56. La Hausse cites Philip Bonner, Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires: The Evolution and Dissolution of the NineteenthCentury Swazi State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Peter Delius, The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Transvaal (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1983); William Beinart, The Political Economy of Pondoland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Jeffrey B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 44 In the South African context, see Minkley and Rassool, ‘Orality, Memory and Social History’. The authors argue that, while oral history was positioned as a means of ‘recovering’ ordinary voices, its use has also proved problematic in cases where oral history is used illustratively, forced to fit into an overarching historical narrative circumscribed by the historian. In so doing, the method’s inclusive and radical potential is undercut. Minkley and Rassool’s critique is preceded by earlier work in social anthropology and history arguing for a self-reflexive awareness of the researcher’s power to represent and edit information within pre-existing disciplinary frameworks. See James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 45 Some classic and useful texts on collective and social memory as a field of study include: Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven,

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Introduction 31

CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Katherine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, eds, Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (London: Routledge, 2003); James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory: New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 46 For some reflections on the disciplinary positioning of heritage studies, see Tim Winter, ‘Clarifying the Critical in Critical Heritage Studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 19, no. 6 (2013): 532–45; Kynan Gentry and Laurajane Smith, ‘Critical Heritage Studies and the Legacies of the Late Twentieth Century Heritage Canon’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no. 11 (2019): 1148–68. 47 See, for example, Derek Peterson, Kodzo Gavua and Ciraj Rassool, eds, The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories and Infrastructures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Annie Coombes, Lotte Hughes and Karega-Munene, Managing Heritage, Making Peace: History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya (London: I.B. Tauris: 2013). 48 See for instance Rassool and Prosalendis, Recalling Community in Cape Town. 49 Ali Khangela Hlongwane and Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, Public History and Culture in South Africa: Memorialisation and Liberation Heritage Sites in Johannesburg and the Township Space (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Noëleen Murray and Leslie Witz, Hostels, Home, Museum: Memorializing Migrant Labour Pasts in Lwandle, South Africa (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2014). 50 Noëleen Murray, Nick Shepherd and Martin Hall, eds, Desire Lines: Space, Memory and Identity in the Post-apartheid City (London: Routledge, 2007). 51 Hamilton et al., Refiguring the Archive, 9. 52 De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life; Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 53 Lindsay Bremner, Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg 1998–2008 (Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, 2010); Steven Dubin, Transforming Museums: Mounting Queen Victoria in a Democratic South Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 54 Jonathan Noble, African Identity in Post-apartheid Public Architecture: White Skin, Black Masks (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 55 Robinson, Power of Apartheid. 56 These memorial spatialities are not confined to South African cities, of course, but are visible in the forms of postcolonial cities all over the world. Zeynep Çelik, for instance, has written on the expression of colonial power through spatiality in Algiers and the persistence of

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these forms into the present. Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 57 Murray, Shepherd, and Hall, Desire Lines. 58 Murray, Shepherd, and Hall, 1.

2

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Memorial constructions: The Red Location Cultural Precinct

Designing for change The story of the Red Location Museum of Struggle and the ‘cultural precinct’ in which it stands is a microcosm for many of the difficulties and fraught politics of memory-making after apartheid. The museum first opened its doors in 2006, but was closed down by Red Location residents in October 2013. Despite ongoing negotiations and periodic newspaper announcements of its imminent reopening, it has remained shuttered to the public since – closed down almost as long as it was operational. Even prior to this closure, the museum occupied a difficult and conflictual space within Red Location and within the city. It is one of many locked, fenced and empty memorial spaces in the surrounding landscape, and as such requires reading through and with these other spaces. It is also an instructive case study of a site in which money, memory, political manoeuvring, and very particular histories of activism, repression and violence have come together to transform a building into a much larger emblem and social object. More broadly, the Red Location site is positioned in the context of a transitional moment of memory-making in South Africa in the 1990s (when the project was first conceptualised). In the twenty years of its existence – both as an idea and as a material object – its various iterations and politics must be read in combination with changing notions of history, belonging and remaking through heritage in South Africa during this period. The idea for the Red Location Museum and Cultural Precinct was first tabled in 1997 when the Port Elizabeth City Council committed funds to its design and development. This was just three

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years after South Africa’s democratic transition, and a year before the conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The zeitgeist, at least in public discourse, was one of transformation, renewal, reconciliation and rainbow-nation rhetoric. It was an ambitious and unprecedented plan: the first major museum project in a South African township, and an opportunity to use memory as the vehicle to recognise the contributions of a historic neighbourhood with a long activist history. As the architect Jo Noero has described it, the intention at the crux of the project was to build a new ‘centre of gravity’ that would lead spatial transformation in a space shaped both by popular mobilisation and by long histories of displacement and state brutality (figures 4 and 5). But sixteen years later, in October 2013, the Red Location Museum closed its doors in the face of vehement protests led by an action group formed by local residents. An art gallery and a library/ archive had been added to the cultural precinct by this time, completed in 2010, but had never been officially opened, staffed or fully used. Initially, it seemed that these closures would be just another temporary hiccup in a story characterised by ­complications, protests

Figure 4  The Red Location Museum of Struggle, front entrance.

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Memorial constructions 35

Figure 5  Red Location Museum in situ, viewed from the residential area at the southern edge.

and delays. Even those leading the protests expected that it would take a month, perhaps two, before the conflicts were resolved and the museum was reopened. But seven years on the buildings remain closed, with the possibility of reopening seeming more and more remote with every year that passes. In this chapter, I trace the evolution of the Red Location Cultural Precinct, in order to understand what happened to the site, and how the issues evoked by the Red Location story might point to larger issues in the remaking of South African urban space and memory in the present. What does this story reveal about the complexities of ideas about ‘community’, ‘participation’ and ‘transformation’? And what might it reveal about the stubborn refusal of the past to remain contained behind museum walls?

The making of Red Location Red Location’s roots as a settlement can be traced to 1902, when it was founded by the Cape Colonial government under the auspices of the Native Reserve Locations Act. Between 1901 and 1905, almost

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every city in South Africa experienced an outbreak of bubonic plague in the wake of the South African War, concentrated in overcrowded city-centre slums and in municipal ‘reserves’. Indicative of contemporary mores about public health, poverty and the spread of disease, the almost universal response to the plague threat was to demolish (and, in many cases, burn to the ground) these city-centre locations, relocating residents to new areas on the outskirts of the city designated for black residents.1 In Port Elizabeth, many of Red Location’s first residents were relocated from Strangers’ Location – now the upmarket suburb of Richmond Hill. Red Location was the first-settled portion of the newly declared New Brighton township, a precursor to the forced removals and segregated development of the apartheid era. It takes its name from the red metal used to construct its first residential buildings: blocks of barrack-like structures, built of materials salvaged from disused South African War barracks in nearby Uitenhage and De Aar. Several of these makeshift buildings remained in use, as residential spaces, for over a hundred years. It was intended to be a peripheral location, in all senses of the word. It was physically removed from the city (although less so from the urban industries it was to feed), economically and developmentally marginalised, and socially excluded from the colonial urban core. Culturally and politically, however, Red Location proved to be one of the city’s major crucibles of struggle throughout the t­wentieth century. This embedded history of resistance was a key rationale for locating the city’s flagship post-apartheid memory project there. Port Elizabeth is historically an industrial city, known for its port and for its booming manufacturing industries. To keep the industrial behemoth running, Port Elizabeth, like all South African cities (as well as successive colonial and national ­governments in this period) needed cheap labour. This created a core basic contradiction of colonial segregationist policies: the need for a ready supply of cheap (black) labour, coupled with the desire to maintain as much physical separation between races as possible. The apartheid idea of cities as ‘white’ preserves in which black South Africans were welcome only insofar as they were ‘­ministering to the white man’s needs’ was well established long before the 1948 election of the National Party on an apartheid platform.2

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Memorial constructions 37

Despite its self-positioning as a relatively ‘liberal’ enclave, Port Elizabeth was no exception as far as race and labour were concerned. Red Location was home to those who provided labour to the nearby factories in the Deal Party industrial strip, as well as to homes and businesses in the city centre. One consequence of these particular relations of labour and capital was the birth of an incredibly powerful and active trade union movement, establishing traditions of political mobilisation that continue to make themselves felt today. The 1952 Defiance Campaign was a major moment in early apartheid resistance politics, not only in the Eastern Cape but all across South Africa. This was a national campaign of passive ­resistance in which volunteers broke the laws of ‘petty apartheid’ and offered themselves up for arrest. These laws, many governed by the 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, included things like racially segregated entrances and waiting rooms in train stations, post offices and public buildings. Walter Sisulu praised the courage of the Defiance Campaign volunteers, calling them Amadela Kufa – ‘defiers of death’.3 One of Red Location’s claims to fame is the often-told story of the very first act of the campaign, which took place at the Red Location railway station just a few metres from where the museum stands today. Raymond Mhlaba, who led the action, recalls the incident in his memoirs: All the people from Red Location came to witness this event … I led the very first group and we entered the ‘Europeans Only’ section of the New Brighton station. By half past six we were already in police vans on our way to jail. It turned out that my party was the very first to defy unjust laws in the whole of South Africa. Little did we know that we were making history.4

In the same year, an accusation of a stolen tin of paint catalysed a violent altercation between New Brighton residents and police, which would become known as the New Brighton Riots of 1952.5 The city council imposed curfews and banned gatherings in response, although protesters fiercely resisted these through strikes and stayaways.6 Up to this point, the city council had resisted implementing the ‘influx control’ measures required by the apartheid state, intended to control the movement of labour to cities and to restrict black South Africans’ rights to the city. Although framed

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as an indication of the council’s supposedly liberal political mores, this reluctance was also economically driven by the need to allow the free flow of labour into an industrial urban economy, unhampered by state bureaucracy and red tape. Following the events of 1952, however, the city council caved to pressure from the national government, and began to enforce pass laws for black men living within the city boundaries. As the apartheid government began to consolidate its power in the 1950s, the ANC implemented a clandestine structure in 1953 called the ‘M-Plan’, named after either Nelson Mandela as key organiser, or the Pan-Africanist Congress’s A.P. Mda – accounts vary. This was a networked organisational structure for local ANC branches, based on secret cells, street committees and area committees. At a national scale, the M-Plan met with limited success and it was not broadly implemented, although a similar structure would later form the backbone of the activities of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the 1980s. Port Elizabeth, however, was the one place where the M-Plan did take root, proving vital to the survival of underground political structures during the deeply repressive 1960s following the Rivonia Trial and the resultant exile and imprisonment of resistance leaders. The M-Plan was significant because it marked the beginning of a shift to underground organisation a full seven years before the ANC’s banning in 1960.7 In popular accounts and according to the museum’s own marketing material, Red Location was the site of the very first of these underground cells in the 1950s (although I have not been able to completely establish what and where this cell was). In the face of intense state repression and imprisonment of activists, the 1960s are sometimes called the ‘quiet decade’ in South African resistance politics. The Treason Trial of 1956–1961 and the Rivonia Trial of 1963 had driven banned political structures firmly underground and had thrown resistance leadership structures into disarray. Then came the volatile 1970s and 1980s: with the growth of the student-led Black Consciousness Movement in  the 1970s and the youth uprisings of 1976 came a resurgence of resistance from within townships. This would gain momentum through the 1980s, not abating until the collapse of the apartheid state in the 1990s. Red Location was a known hotspot for political mobilisation and resistance activity in the 1970s and 1980s, driven by

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Memorial constructions 39

civic ­organisations, youth movements and underground political structures. Besides the well-documented events noted here, there is a wealth of everyday experiences of resistance within Red Location. Lungelwa Makina, who would later be at the forefront of protests against the Red Location Museum, grew up in a family with a long history of political involvement. Her father Sithembiso Makina was forcibly removed from the neighbourhood of Kleinskool to Red Location in 1955 as the racialised boundaries drawn by the Group Areas Act began to be implemented. His first home in Red Location was in the wood and iron barracks at Block 43, on the land where the museum now stands. Lungelwa grew up in Red Location in the 1980s, at the height of some of the most intense experiences of resistance and repression in South African history. She remembers her experiences of ‘joining politics’ in the 1980s: I was born in 1970, I grew up here at Red Location. I remember in 1982 my father was arrested because the municipality took a ­grandmother’s stuff outside the house, and my father took that stuff again and put it inside … at the end PEBCO took a lawyer for my father. In 1984, my older brother joined COSATU. He was a former member of COSAS. The reason I joined politics in 1984, I was fourteen years – because the police came at home, asking for my brother, and if my brother is not here at home, they would just take me ... I said no, instead of just sitting down and folding my arms, I must go there. So I joined politics in 1984 at school, as a COSAS member.8

Makina also remembers regular police raids on the family home throughout the 1980s: They came at night. We were just at home … We know what they want, what they’re going to do, and they’re going to leave my home omgekrap! [They would] look through the house, krap everything, and check for membership cards and documents and T-shirts … My father would hide the books in the drain, but the police would get those books through the dogs. So afterwards he said, I won’t leave my books there any more. We walked as churchgoers that time, wearing church clothing, meanwhile we were going to meetings … It was the way we grew up. You know, when I was young I was scared to see the police, but at the age of eleven, twelve – even now I don’t care, because we know

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we will breathe every day, we see them every day, so why must we be afraid of them?9

At the apex of the political conflict of the 1980s, Red Location was threatened with removal. The Ibhayi Town Council – the body which governed New Brighton at this time – announced a plan to move Red Location’s residents to the township of Motherwell a few kilometres to the north, in an attempt to ‘stabilise and neutralise’ sections of Port Elizabeth’s townships where the security police were in danger of losing control in the face of intensive popular resistance. Red Location would be moved first, followed by Soweto-on-Sea – the stronghold of the youth militia known as the Amabutho, whose story appears in more detail in chapter 5. Although this plan was ostensibly presented as a means to address poor living conditions and overcrowding, it was no coincidence that Red Location and Soweto-on-Sea were both highly active centres of resistance. In this instance, mobilisation against the plan was so immediate and intense that the city council was forced to shelve the removals, undertaking instead to replace some of the century-old wood and iron houses with brick houses and to install a waterborne sewage system. Some of these promised houses were eventually built and handed over to 436 families in 1992, in the midst of South Africa’s political transition. Through these histories, and its close ties to a narrative of ANC-led struggle in the Eastern Cape townships, Red Location was a powerful symbolic space for post-apartheid transformation.  Its promised redevelopment was, undoubtedly, a politically driven project; it was also an opportunity to begin to remake city space that had been profoundly fractured and wounded through its colonial and apartheid histories. In this case, this remaking was to come through an ambitious architectural project of memory.

Envisioning the cultural precinct In 1994, the governance of Port Elizabeth passed into the hands of a new Transitional Local Council, headed by Nceba Faku. Faku was a regional organiser for the Eastern Cape ANC hailing from New Brighton, and had spent thirteen years on Robben Island as

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Memorial constructions 41

a ­political prisoner. He was officially elected as mayor in the first nationwide local government elections in 1995, becoming one of the first black mayors in South Africa. The transitional council inherited a city of deep divisions – spatial, social, economic and political. Under apartheid the city had been segregated under four separate local councils, which now had to be brought together under a single tax base with a unified future vision and plan. Within three years, the transitional council had pledged significant funds towards seven projects in the city’s townships, as a first step towards redress and rolling back some of the divisions and spatial violence of apartheid. These included green spaces, public amenities and community centres in the Northern Areas, Motherwell, Kwazakele and Bethelsdorp – all spaces that had historically been set aside for black, coloured10 and Indian residents, and as such had been chronically underfunded and underdeveloped. R13 million (around £650,000), about a quarter of the overall funding, was ­committed to a new cultural precinct in Red Location. As has been the practice for much post-liberation public architecture, the design for the new precinct would be chosen by open competition – a strategy used in many other large memory projects of the 1990s and 2000s. This approach of open or public participation in shaping the bricks-and-mortar symbols of the new nation was in many ways a reaction against an oppressive apartheid state in which the idea of a ‘public’ had little meaning.11 A comprehensive brief for the design competition was disseminated in 1998, put together by Albrecht Heroldt Architects.12 On the basis of this brief, the new precinct was to include a museum, art gallery, library, marketplace, theatre, and retail and commercial space, built in the historic heart of New Brighton amidst the century-old wood and iron terraced houses that formed its symbolic and geographical core. As part of the new precinct, these historic houses would be restored and conserved as places of memory and as a living a­ rchitectural archive. A close look at the competition document is instructive for what it reveals about how the purpose and ambitions of the Red Location developments were framed at the outset. The planned new space was tasked with an extraordinarily ambitious set of outcomes, framed by a dreamy, almost poetic sense of utopianism. Most simply, it was intended to serve as a place of memory and to

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honour the histories of a space that was both extraordinary and made meaningful through its ordinariness: Red Location was one of thousands of South African urban spaces of mobilisation, everyday resistance and violent repression that now had to come to terms with the traumas and the triumphs of its histories. The competition brief makes much of these histories, but is particularly interesting in its assessment of what these histories were meant to do once they entered the public realm through the medium of architecture. Large sections of the brief were devoted to background information on Red Location and its historical significance, accompanied by archival and contemporary photographs and portraits of Red Location’s streetscapes and residents and flowery literary quotes that indicated the scale at which the new project was being conceived: Say ‘yes’ to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky. Say ‘yes’ to the universe and planets become our neighbours. Say ‘yes’ to dreams of love and freedom. It is the password to utopia.13

Love, freedom, the universe and the password to utopia: clearly, the new development was intended to be far more than just a set of buildings, or even simply an economic or cultural stimulus for change. The competition brief cites Red Location’s histories of resistance and its links to a national story of victorious struggle as central to this ambitious developmental project. This idealism is also framed as a driver for tourism-led economic transformation: the brief notes that this site of ‘major political significance’ has ‘the potential, if developed with the appropriate care and imagination, to become a major tourist attraction in the Eastern Cape and beyond’. The new development was tasked with a bewildering range of expectations: The transformation of Red Location forms part of the Port Elizabeth Municipality’s strategy of upgrading previously disadvantaged ­communities … The concept is to redevelop the site into a major tourist attraction that would focus attention on life in the township. These buildings and the artefacts they hold should depict that part of the political chronicles of South Africa which are not well represented in the history books of today. They could act as a catharsis for many with pent-up anger and frustration birthed by the past. Simultaneously the new complex could create a window of insight



Memorial constructions 43

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into the plight of the inhabitants of these areas for those who did not join in the struggle. Being located in this township it will bring nonparticipants right into the heart of where history was made.14

Even this short extract is enormously illuminating of the disparate kinds of work with which the new precinct was being tasked. It was a transformative project, intended to address historic disadvantage and neglect. It would be a major tourist attraction (and thereby drive economic development at multiple levels). It would ‘write in’ neglected aspects of resistance history. It would serve a therapeutic function as a point of catharsis for trauma and anger. It would serve a pedagogical function, particularly for those diplomatically referred to as ‘non-participants’ in the struggle; and this pedagogical function would be served not only by the buildings and their contents, but by the surrounding township itself. This was clearly a highly ambitious set of goals, to put it mildly. The potential pitfalls of this project may seem obvious with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time, there was simply no precedent for this plan. The heritage-based developments in Kliptown, probably the closest comparison, did not exist on paper or in reality yet. There were no museums (in the official sense) in any South African townships: large public memory projects under apartheid had been solely the preserve of the ‘white’ city centres, and architectural heritage in particular was understood both legislatively and in practice as an intrinsically colonial project. The firm Noero Wolff, based in Cape Town and led by architects Jo Noero and Heinrich Wolff, won the competition for the precinct’s design and was appointed in 1999. Noero’s previous projects included a range of educational, civic and low-cost housing developments in Johannesburg’s townships: housing in Alexandra (1985) and Lenasia (1986), the Katlehong Resource Centre (1989) and the Funda Community College (1990). Jo Noero, acknowledging the daunting scale of the project, describes the plans for Red Location as a catalyst for a wholesale shift of cultural production from the city centre to the township: I think the ambition was huge. The ambition was to create a new cultural centre for the Metro, and to shift the locus of culture from the centre of Port Elizabeth to New Brighton … That was certainly the ambition of Faku and a whole lot of other people. So it was about

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creating a facility for the development of local arts, crafts, et cetera, but at the same time to elevate performance and other kinds of activities to the extent that it would become a place that the wider community of Port Elizabeth would use. And that would have spinoffs in terms of jobs … And I still think, that is still the ambition.15

Architecture of memory This long-term future vision for a transformed Red Location (and, by extension, a transformed city) would be achieved largely through an architectural design intervention, which in turn would draw particular kinds of cultural, artistic and intellectual activities to the area. The design was to be implemented in phases, beginning with the Red Location Museum of Struggle as the cornerstone of the project, but over time including a multi-part precinct dedicated to art, literature, memory, archives, performance and education. As the centrepiece of the project, Noero Wolff’s design for the Red Location Museum of Struggle departed from common architectural and curatorial tropes for memorial museums, using architecture to encourage a multivalent and non-linear approach to representing memory. The building paid homage to the city’s industrial heritage and specifically to the nearby Deal Party factory precinct, with its modernist, factory-inspired sawtooth roof, its use of raw concrete, steel, wood, and the rusted red iron that had become so emblematic of Red Location and its built heritage. The central and muchlauded design element was the use of twelve monumental exhibition spaces in the heart of the museum, which the architects referred to as ‘memory boxes’. Each box is six by six metres wide and twelve metres high, towering above visitors, with a single entrance. The boxes are clad in corrugated Corten steel, rusted to match the original red iron buildings of Red Location (figure 6). The looming structures tower over visitors, who are left to make their way between these disparate exhibition spaces along the narrow concrete corridors that divide them, and in so doing construct a serendipitous, non-linear narrative. Jo Noero has linked the memory boxes to Andreas Huyssen’s notion of the ‘twilight of memory’: the act of moving through and between the boxes serves as an architectural metaphor for the ‘gap between experiencing the

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Memorial constructions 45

Figure 6  View of the ‘memory boxes’ within the museum.

event and remembering it’, the liminal space in which interpretation, reflection and discomfort emerge.16 The intention is for the visitor to author an individual trajectory and engage simultaneously with many narratives, rather than relying on the institutional authority of the museum as ‘giver of canonical truths’.17 The term ‘memory box’ is, in several architectural reviews of the building, understood as a metaphor for containers for migrant workers’ personal possessions, as micro-archives of individual memory. This image does not really hold up to historical scrutiny. People certainly did come to Port Elizabeth from rural and peri-urban areas in search of work, particularly during periods of increasing urbanisation in the 1930s and 1940s. Increased black urbanisation in this period provided the impetus for the newer sections of New Brighton built by the city council in the 1940s and later, such as White Location, KwaFord and McNamee Village.18 However, Port Elizabeth was not a centre of seasonal migrant labour in the same way as, for example, the gold-mining towns in the former Transvaal (such as Johannesburg): it had a relatively settled black working-class population and a roughly 50:50 ratio

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of men and women from quite early on. Linking Red Location to the ‘memory box’ as a metaphor for migrancy is thus somewhat tenuous. Beyond the historical accuracy of this image, Noëleen Murray has also pointed out the ethical and representational difficulties of placing this metaphor so centrally in the museum’s design: The space of the subjugated worker becomes the form and materialisation of the memory, both in the overall factory-like structure of the building and the corten ‘memory boxes’ … A bizarre move in the context of ghettoised working conditions, as if those who inhabited the space of the factory are somehow at home in these spaces which are rendered as natural, modern and stylised.19

The twelve memory boxes sit at the heart of the museum building. Around them is a series of other alcoves, rooms and exhibition areas, providing spaces for a changeable constellation of exhibitions and representations. The visitor’s view on entering the museum is dominated by a steel structure jutting into the middle of the lobby area – the back of an auditorium used for lectures, book launches, school groups and performances (figure 7). To the visitor’s right is an unfinished exhibition on the history of Red Location, striking in that it was built from scraps of salvaged rusted iron from the original houses that once occupied the space where the museum now

Figure 7  Interior view of the museum from the main entrance.

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Memorial constructions 47

sits. The overall effect is dark, serious and brooding: certainly not a space of lightness and play, but one of sombre reflection, in keeping with the specific focus on ‘struggle’ suggested by the museum’s full title. Museum curator Christopher Du Preez recounts a museumsponsored event hosting a group of elderly women, including many former political activists from Red Location, shortly after its 2006 opening. Positioned among the memory boxes are bare concrete benches, intended as spaces for rest and reflection in between exhibitions. This built-in furniture was left deliberately cold and uncomfortable to reflect the uncomfortable histories that visitors are meant to confront in the museum space. However, this particular group of activists, he recalls, were less than impressed: the benches were unacceptably inhospitable, and they did not need to be somatically reminded of the deprivations and injuries of apartheid that, indeed, many of the women still carried under their skin. The curator hastily procured a set of living-room cushions from Mr Price, a cheap and cheerful South African home furnishing shop, much to the architects’ horror. In the end, the concrete benches were given light wood seats as a compromise between rough aesthetic and practical comfort. This anecdote, as darkly amusing as it is, illustrates some of the compromises and orientations of the museum’s design: who, after all, was the space intended to address? Was this the ‘catharsis’ of anger and past horror that the 1998 design brief had called for? The 2006 museum building was joined in 2009–2010 by a new art gallery and library building. The remaining components of the precinct plan – a theatre complex, a performing arts school and a block of new subsidised housing – remain unbuilt. At every step, even before breaking ground for the new museum, the development has been met with conflict and contestation. Relationships with Red Location residents have been, to put it mildly, strained. The most vehement and most lasting iteration of this conflict was the closure of the museum in late 2013 in the face of protest from residents. At the time of writing, seven years later, no resolution has been reached; negotiations between a fragmented, contested and struggling municipality and the various groups of Red Location residents (all representing slightly different interests) continue to drag on. These conflicts have a history of their own, which illuminates many

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of the complexities of making heritage and driving heritage-led transformation in a city where the past remains inescapably close to the surface of living memory and everyday experience.

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Yet they demolished our houses In Red Location, the processes of transformation, change and ‘development’ – whatever one might mean by these – have been fraught and difficult for a very long time. In one sense, the museum and the cultural precinct have been a catalyst for these contestations, but in another reading they have brought to the surface the fragmented politics and dysfunctional governmental relations that have been simmering for years – or decades. The story of the Red Location Cultural Precinct reveals complex intersections between the politics of memory, the discourse of ‘participation’ and the multiple ways in which memory appears in public space in unexpected or subversive ways. Throughout this book, I explore some of the ways in which memory refuses to be contained in the spaces set aside for it. In Red Location, I argue, its histories and memories are more visible in the events around the museum’s various closures and struggles than they ever were within its walls. When the museum project was first mooted and the brief developed, it was clear that Red Location had a number of pressing material needs that could not be solved by a centre of memory. The bulk of Red Location’s housing was informal, with many people living in self-built shacks without running water or electricity. Many still used the antiquated bucket toilet system that had been in place for nearly a hundred years. Unemployment in the community was rife, a particular problem given the relative youth of the area’s population. Today, as then, the need for housing, services, security of tenure and economic opportunity remains central to contestation over Red Location’s futures and forms of development. At the outset, it was clear to the project’s planners and designers that some measure of consultation and participation would be vital to the success of the project and for general buy-in from residents. It was not so obvious, however, what these terms actually meant – as remains the case in many public projects in South Africa, where

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Memorial constructions 49

‘consultation’ is often legislatively required but where the terms and structures for undertaking it remain murkily defined. As Christa Kuljian has pointed out, residents’ committees are often established as channels of communication in urban development projects; however, their role is too often stripped of real power as they tend to be presented with a project design that is already a fait accompli, leaving them in a position as go-betweens for a flow of information between residents and city councils, planners and designers without any genuine powers of co-creation or ground-up design.20 One such committee was established in 1999, after the council-appointed judging panel had awarded Noero Wolff the design contract for the Red Location precinct. At this early stage, residents recall that there were already concerns about the project’s cost and what this would mean for other priorities in the neighbourhood: Our first question was, how much was it so that this museum can be built? … They told us they are going to build a museum, and also they are going to build houses.21

The question of housing would ultimately remain a sticking point between the city council and Red Location residents throughout the project’s implementation and after. Some councillors and officials expressed similar concerns in city council meetings. Was it justifiable to spend R13 million (£650,000) on a museum and arts complex in the face of such urgent need? With the project stalled by these concerns, in early 2000 mayor Nceba Faku tabled a suggestion to move R9.5 million (£475,000) of the municipal funding allocated to Red Location to a dedicated housing fund instead. A report from the city treasury noted with some consternation that money already spent on the project, including on road and infrastructure upgrades in the museum’s immediate vicinity, would be wasted if alternative funding could not be found to cover the resulting shortfall.22 However, the treasury also highlighted that there were strong motivations to fund housing. These included longstanding delivery backlogs, the political need for visible service delivery (presumably with additional urgency, given the upcoming local government elections in 2001) and ‘historical promises’ that had been made to residents. There were also existing donors’ investments to consider, including Swedish infrastructure upgrade funding that would be under threat if the project was abandoned or

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scaled down.23 So, in March 2000, the city council voted to keep the museum’s funding intact while allocating an additional R5 million (£250,000) of funding to new housing to be built simultaneously with the museum.24 Initially, the museum building was meant to be completed in 2001. However, delays related to the funding and housing negotiations meant that ground was only broken in April 2003, and it would take another three years to get the building to a point where the museum could open to the public. Once construction started, residents became increasingly concerned that building of the promised housing meant to accompany the museum had not yet begun. In addition, some of the remaining 1902 iron houses had been demolished to make way for the new building, causing major mistrust and anxiety when new replacement housing did not  seem  to be forthcoming. A group of residents calling themselves the New Brighton Concerned Residents Group (NBCR) began a letter-­writing campaign, widely targeting provincial and local government structures related to the museum and to city governance, demanding clarity regarding housing plans and the whereabouts of the funding that had been set aside for this project. With no answers forthcoming, the group began organising protest action at the construction site. As one of the group’s members recalls: They told us there would be a museum and houses [at the same time]. There will be no-one left behind … But when we saw it was only the museum that was progressing, that’s where we started the question of, the museum must be closed down.25

The group issued a list of demands in 2003 that encapsulates some of the prevalent concerns about the direction the museum project was taking. The list begins, in Xhosa, ‘Ithyolo lokuzimele libalulekile, yindawo yokuhlala ke leyo,’ meaning ‘A place to take shelter is important, that is a house.’26 It continues (translated): People are not against the building of the museum, the question is, how can they build it while people and their families are living in schools and fields? … Our houses were demolished and the remains left there by the councillors of Mr Nceba Faku … We want Phase 3, as we had told Mr Jimmy Tutu … We were born and grew up here, yet they demolished our houses.27

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Memorial constructions 51

The ‘Phases’ of housing mentioned in the NBCR document refer to various sections of subsidised housing that had been built over the years – not to be confused with the various phases of the Red Location Cultural Precinct itself. In local housing terms, ‘Phase 1’ is the houses that had been built in 1992 in the wake of the thwarted removal of Red Location. ‘Phase 2’ refers to a block of houses built in the mid-1990s under the Reconstruction and Development Programme. (These poorly constructed ‘Phase 2’ houses would later prove to be a significant catalyst in the 2013 closure of the museum.) Where the document insists that ‘we want Phase 3’, this means the new formal housing that had been promised to accompany museum construction. It was clear that dealing with matters of housing, and the services and dignity that formal housing represented, would be inseparable from the cultural precinct’s role within Red Location. Despite negotiations and public meetings between Red Location residents and local government officials, tensions continued to escalate and protests began to break out at the construction site of the half-complete museum building. On 16 September 2003, twenty-six protesters were arrested on the museum’s doorstep. All were later released without charge, but this moment signalled a p ­ rofound breakdown of trust between residents and local government structures that would plague the Red Location precinct for the next decade. News reports quote councillor Tutu calling the protesters ‘a small group of unruly and ill-disciplined youth’,28 while Mbulelo Gidane – a city official on the management team of the city’s Recreational and Cultural Services division – described the protests in correspondence to colleagues as ‘very frustrating issues taking place at this historical project’, pleading that ‘we cannot allow a few individuals to hold us to ransom to our delivery’.29 It is difficult to ascertain exactly what levels of support there were for the protests, and how much legitimacy the leaders of this protest were accorded by residents. However, the protests were well supported enough to effectively halt construction at the museum site – a dress rehearsal of sorts for the protests ten years later that would result in its indefinite closure. It is also striking, from the news reports and correspondence that offer a glimpse into this history, to note how protesters were viewed by officials: as nuisances, as annoying obstacles, as misguided youth. If protesters were framed in this way, it no doubt made their grievances easier to dismiss, as

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simply ill-informed opposition to progress. But this failure to take residents’ anger and sense of exclusion seriously would have major repercussions later on. At the same time, municipal officials were under immense pressure to launch this internationally funded, highly visible public project, and so a solution had to be found to the impasse, even if only temporarily. The city council appointed the Independent Mediation Services of the Eastern Cape to run a mediation process and try to find a way forward. However, by this point relations had broken down to the extent that it was a struggle just to get the relevant parties into a room together. A proposed ‘commission of inquiry’ had to be postponed twice after only six out of sixteen members of the ward’s Branch Executive Committee attended the first meeting, and none at all attended the second. One can imagine the disgruntlement of residents at these meetings in the face of this seeming dismissal of the issues at hand. The commission eventually met in September 2003. Its role was to look into residents’ allegations of corruption and non-­transparency on the part of the ward council’s executive – which explains the executive’s reluctance to attend. When the commission was finally able to meet, it highlighted two major issues. Firstly, the project committee that had been set up in 1999 to act as a go-between for officials and residents in planning the project was broadly perceived as illegitimate. Secondly, the ward executive – in particular the housing committee responsible for allocation of social and subsidised housing – was accused of corruption, non-transparent allocations and arbitrary alterations to existing beneficiary lists.30 The issue, clearly, ran much deeper than worry about the delivery of state-subsidised housing: in many ways, Red Location’s issues foreshadow some of the deep political fragmentation that would paralyse Port Elizabeth’s governance in future years. As a proposed resolution, the commission asked protesters to allow building on the museum complex to resume, while the city was to ensure that building of the new houses began immediately. The commission agreed with residents that the housing committee had unjustifiable discretionary powers to alter beneficiary lists, and that this was counter to the principles of transparency and equity. At the crux of the ongoing conflict, according to the commission’s report, was ‘the perception of unequal treatment’, which had been

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Memorial constructions 53

escalated by ‘attitudes and behaviour of certain members of the BEC [Branch Executive Committee]’.31 Two weeks after the commission’s close, with no sign of construction beginning on the 340 promised units of the Phase 3 housing, members of the NBCR group marched to councillor Tutu’s office and emptied buckets of faeces inside and outside the building. This visceral act of protest drew on longstanding contentions over living conditions for which the ‘bucket toilet’ system, in use in Red Location since 1904, had become emblematic. The protesters were arrested and charged with intimidation and assault.32 However, this action had the desired outcome: construction of the third phase of housing began in November 2003, five years after the plans for Red Location had first been outlined in the design competition brief. Work was slow. By 2005, only two hundred houses had been built, less than two-thirds of the stock that had been planned. Tensions began to flare up again while these houses were being allocated: the NBCR resumed its letter-writing campaign, this time complaining that allocation processes remained opaque and corrupt and that in any case the new housing was ‘not of a standard for human beings to live in’.33 Some residents had been allocated sites where no houses had yet been built. This meant informal settlement residents were asked to move from their homes to allow for the installation of infrastructure, but responded angrily when it turned out they did not yet have anywhere to go while awaiting the housing project’s completion.34 These battles raged throughout 2005, and in November of that year another major protest broke out when around two hundred people arrived on the museum’s doorstep. Disgruntled residents again carried buckets of human excrement collected from bucket toilets in the informal settlement, which they emptied outside the museum’s front door, and burnt tyres. The security guard on duty that day reported: [The security] rushed back to the museum and informs about a crowd of +−200 people toyi-toying in the direction of the museum. The crowd gathered in front of the museum and emptied buckets of faeces  … They also gathered tyres and set them alight … A quick response from the different security unit members … resulted that the situation was brought under control.35

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Curator Christopher Du Preez, who had been on museum staff for just under a year when the renewed protests had begun, recalls the incident somewhat more emotionally:

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They burnt tyres and demonstrated here in front. In fact, because they still used the bucket system here, they actually threw out the buckets in front of the museum. Disgusting! God! I will never forget that. I can’t even think about it!36

Museum director Gcinibandla Mtukela almost immediately opened a case of trespassing at the local police station. He also compiled a report listing suggestions for measures to prevent such protests from taking place again: installation of CCTV cameras, improved security systems, riot and fire insurance, and better-located fire hoses.37 As in 2003, the approach to protesters was to treat them as an annoying obstacle at best, and at worst as a direct threat to the project that needed to be managed and kept at bay. This was clearly not an auspicious beginning for an institution that would later lay claim to creative curatorial and programmatic practices predicated on openness and ‘community’ focus. The long-awaited housing project was finally completed at the end of 2006 (figure 8). At the handover event, municipal Housing

Figure 8  New subsidised housing handed over to residents in October 2006.

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Memorial constructions 55

and Land portfolio committee member Melvin Manentsa acknowledged that it was ‘a pity’ delivery had been so slow: ‘some people have died and they never had the chance to live in decent houses.’38 Although at no point in the process were residents asked to move out of Red Location, the use of in situ upgrading meant that land had to be cleared bit by bit so that building and infrastructure installation could take place. Residents were almost invariably reluctant to either move out temporarily or rebuild their shacks elsewhere in Red Location, and in many instances resisted these requests. On the one hand, it is perhaps understandable that officials became so frustrated at the delays to a project ultimately intended for residents’ benefit. But on the other, it is equally understandable that residents did not have any real precedent to trust the state to deliver on its promises. For over a century, Red Location residents’ security of tenure and land rights had been under constant threat. As far back as 1902, promises regarding secure tenure and freehold ownership of property in Red Location had been broken by the colonial state. The narrowly avoided apartheid removals planned in 1986 were well within living memory. It is no surprise that these experiences, along with the recent reactions to protest within local government, instilled mistrust and anxiety. The NBCR has kept a thorough archive of letters, memorandums and other paraphernalia from the 2003–2005 protest. A battered photocopy of one of the group’s handwritten letters to the city council, querying the validity of the city’s promises to build housing alongside the museum, has attached a stapled-on copy of a 1986 memorandum from the previous city council. This document, addressed to Red Location (or ‘Masangwanaville’, as it is also sometimes called) assures residents that no forced removals would take place, and that new formal housing would be built instead. It is worth noting that one of the elderly men active in the NBCR, Sithembiso Makina, had also been at the forefront of the 1986 protests against these planned removals. To the NBCR and its supporters, these events were part of the same historical trajectory, and the community’s right to land and security had to be defended irrespective of who the face of the state was at that moment. Echoes like these appear everywhere in the story of Red Location, moments of historical leakage in which the past seeps into the present as a reminder that it has never really been laid to rest.

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Awards and accolades Despite the vehement contestation taking place on the ground, the museum raked in international accolades for its design and architecture. There is a particular irony in the knowledge that while buckets of human faeces were being emptied on the doorstep and protesting residents were being arrested, the architects were awarded the Royal Institute of British Architecture’s highly prestigious Lubetkin Prize for 2006. In the same year, the museum building won the Dedalo Minosse International Prize, an award promoted by the Italian architectural association Assoarchitett. And as the instigator of the cultural precinct project, the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality won two World Leadership Awards from the nowdefunct World Leadership Forum, in the categories of architecture and town planning respectively. In all of these instances, it is clear that what was being awarded and praised was not necessarily the process of remaking Red Location, but rather the material product of this remaking in the form of the Red Location Museum of Struggle. The museum – and, later on, the cultural precinct – was a bricks-and-mortar product that was meant to be a transformative catalyst. Somehow, new processes of making and ways of being would emanate organically from the presence of these new buildings, leading to a transformed future for Red Location. But in the course of making this material product, the delays and contestations suggest that something went badly wrong in the process: not only of making the buildings themselves but at a much deeper level. Whose voices were taken into account in the process of reshaping Red Location and making decisions about what kind of ‘development’ was most needed? Thus, while the architectural product was raking in awards for its aesthetic and its philosophical underpinnings, a flawed set of processes meant that the building-as-object was taking on an entirely new and unplanned set of meanings within Red Location. Christopher Du Preez recalls that when he took up the curator post, he arrived to find a spectacular but empty building, with no collections in place. The municipal arts and culture officials to whom he was accountable insisted that, with the opening only

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Memorial constructions 57

two months away, his immediate task was to fill this overwhelming space. This directive was not just challenging but arguably impossible, especially without a full curatorial and research team. The disjuncture between process and product is, as a result, also reflected in curatorial strategies, especially in the earliest days of the museum. Despite the small curatorial team’s best intentions, it was placed in an impossible situation in which all attention had been given to the spectacular building, with little preceding thought to what this building would contain and what, ultimately, this cavernous space was meant to do. The late appointment of a curator – only in 2005 – is indicative of an approach that assumes that the most important aspect of the museum is the building, and the curator’s job is simply to fill an empty space. This left museum staff scrambling for content and programming support from the outset, which was to have serious effects further along in the process.

Bodies in the museum One of the strangest artefacts of this period, while the museum’s planned opening date was being pushed further and further out in the face of protest and political complications, is an unoccupied mausoleum – now hidden behind an opaque glass wall just off the entrance lobby. To access it, you step up on to a raised platform and then through a door into a small, intimate temporary exhibition space. A frosted glass wall forms one end of the space; if you know the secret, you can hook a hand around one side of the wall and push, sliding it to one side to reveal a plushly carpeted room containing two glass-fronted alcoves and a stone sarcophagus (figure 9). The effect is undeniably surreal. Two large-format photographic portraits of struggle veterans Raymond Mhlaba and Govan Mbeki, father of former president Thabo Mbeki, are propped up haphazardly against a wall. A caption under the Mbeki portrait reads, ‘What a joy it is to be alive in these days when history is being made all around us.’ The two men remain interred in the cemeteries where they were originally buried, with no indication anywhere else of the bizarre story that almost led to their bodies being moved into the museum, where they were to be protected for posterity by armed guards.

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Figure 9  Empty sarcophagus hidden behind a sliding wall in the museum.

Mbeki and Mhlaba were two of Port Elizabeth’s best-known struggle heroes, both stalwarts of the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the ANC. They were among the nine men sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island in 1964, alongside Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Elias Motsoaledi, Andrew Mlangeni, Wilton Mkwayi and Dennis Goldberg, following the 1963–1964 Rivonia Trial. Mhlaba had served as the first premier of the newly formed Eastern Cape in the 1990s. Govan Mbeki died in 2001 and was buried in nearby Zwide Cemetery. Mhlaba, or ‘Oom Ray’ (Uncle Ray) as he was affectionately known, died in February 2005. Almost immediately ­following Mhlaba’s death, mayor Nceba Faku declared his intention to exhume the remains of both men and move their bodies into the Red Location Museum. A reburial ceremony was planned as part of the museum’s April 2005 opening celebrations. The fact that Mhlaba had been laid to rest only a couple of months before does not seem to have deterred the mayor. Although exhumation permits and permission from families were not yet in

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place, Faku requested the architects of the nearly complete museum building to alter the plans, to turn a storage space into a mausoleum. He also instructed the contractors already working on the building to commence work at an additional cost of R1.3 million (£65,000). This cost had not been approved through the city council’s channels and had not gone through any official procurement processes, as would emerge later on, amid a raft of other charges of irregular expenditure during the mayor’s term of office. Perhaps predictably, the Mbeki and Mhlaba families were reluctant to agree to this plan. The local newspaper The Herald reported shortly after Mhlaba’s death that first lady Zanele Mbeki (Govan Mbeki’s daughter-in-law) and Mhlaba’s widow Dideka had visited the proposed mausoleum site and had given their approval.39 However, the remainder of the Mbeki family unequivocally rejected Faku’s plan. With Faku presumably hoping to convince them other­ wise, the museum opening was postponed to September that year. In early August 2005, the story broke that the tender for the mausoleum had been illegally awarded in terms of the Municipal Finance Management Act – an extremely serious allegation. Legally, the municipal manager was the only person who could authorise this type of contract, and the work had to be put out to public tender. It turned out that the municipal manager Mzimasi Mangcotywa, described in one news report as ‘Faku’s arch-enemy in the municipality’, had refused to sign Faku’s application for the funds on these grounds. Although building had gone ahead anyway, the mayor was forced to concede in a council meeting that he had not followed proper procedure.40 By mid-September, it was clear that the museum was not going to open on Heritage Day, 24 September. The opening was rescheduled again, initially to November and later to February 2006. Archived correspondence from this period between the recently appointed curator and the museum director indicates the mounting anxiety around the reburial plans and the ethics of having a gravesite inside the museum: How should one read the mayor’s instructions regarding the mausoleum? I got the feeling he wants to see progress on the recommended changes when he returns in early November. What decisions were concluded, if any, regarding notifying the architects, tenders

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etc. … [a]nd what are the implications of having a ‘graveyard’ in the Museum? … How does one interpret intellectually multiple graves in a ‘vibrant’, ‘cultural’ museum and in relation to custom? How does the Museum’s mission accommodate such a spectacle?41

Piecing together the story from interviews, news articles and the museum records, it seems that the mausoleum plan was fomenting chaos for the museum staff tasked with getting the museum ready to launch. Under pressure from the mayor’s office, planning was still going ahead for a ‘gala opening’ in February 2006 that would include the reburial ceremony. In the meantime, however, Mbeki’s son Moeletsi had ‘sternly turned down’ Faku’s proposal and was brooking no further negotiation on the matter. Faku was being publicly lambasted after a series of one-on-one meetings with Mbeki’s elderly widow Epainette, who had apparently relented in favour of the idea. Eastern Cape political activist Mkhuseli Jack called it a ‘monumental blunder’.42 Highly placed ANC officials, including former Eastern Cape Premier and Minister of Sports and Recreation Makhenkesi Stofile, intervened to warn Faku to drop the matter, citing concerns over the plan’s ‘ideological, cultural and philosophical motivation’.43 In early February 2006, the opening ceremony – now a year overdue – was called off. At this point, the ANC National Executive stepped in to take the matter out of Faku’s hands. By 15 February, Mayoral Committee member Charmaine Williams was explaining to reporters that ‘we will go ahead with the official opening even without the reburials. There is no connection between the two now.’44 By the time the museum eventually opened in November 2006, the plans had been entirely shelved and the half-complete mausoleum was sealed off behind its glass sliding wall.

Curatorial strategies and the politics of representation To the curator’s presumable relief, he did not have to incorporate a mausoleum complete with armed soldiers lining the steps into the curatorial strategy. And, although the delays in opening the museum were stressful in their own right, they provided time to develop a set of exhibitions and the beginnings of a collection.

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The twelve ‘memory boxes’ in many ways dictated the curatorial strategy of the museum, as a set of twelve disparate displays that could provide different stories, perspectives and representations of Nelson Mandela Bay and the Eastern Cape’s contribution to the struggle against apartheid. Besides the memory boxes, the museum included a large amount of wall space around the central section, a few smaller alcoves and areas for temporary exhibitions and a ‘Hall of Columns’ down one side. This is a set of concrete bollards draped with banners depicting ‘local heroes’ of the struggle (figure 10). In 2012, the activist and academic Janet Cherry wrote a review report on the museum’s curation for Dojon Financial Services, the consultancy tasked with fundraising and business management for the precinct. Dojon is led by Rory Riordan, the former ANC councillor who had enthusiastically championed the Red Location project while in office. In this report Cherry noted that the museum’s

Figure 10  The Hall of Columns.

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overwhelming focus on individual biographies belied the ‘dynamic and collective nature of the struggle in Port Elizabeth’.45 She refers in particular to several photographic exhibitions in the memory boxes, including a set of portraits of Eastern Cape activists by the late David Goldblatt, and another set of photographic portraits of less well-known activists and local figures by Rory Riordan’s son Jon Riordan, called Forgotten Faces. The Hall of Columns and the history of this exhibition, as recounted by Du Preez, highlight some of the political complications of the treatment of biography and ‘local heroism’ in the museum. Throughout the exhibitions it is clear that one of the museum’s intentions is to recount a history of struggle with a particular ‘Eastern Cape’ voice, and a specific focus on histories of Nelson Mandela Bay. Gary Baines, writing around the time of the museum’s opening, has argued that the Red Location Museum ‘represents a real danger that outsiders might impose their vision of what New Brighton’s past should mean for those who have lived here’, and that voices which do not fit into a dominant narrative viewing Red Location’s past solely through the lens of struggle may be excluded from the space of public memory.46 The production of the Hall of Columns certainly reflects some of both Cherry’s and Baines’ concerns, as well as some of the failing of the institution’s attempts to facilitate ‘community-led’ research processes. In January 2005, the original residents’ committee that had been acting as go-between for Red Location residents and city officials was replaced with an elected fourteen-person body called the New Brighton Coordinating Forum. This forum was meant to act as a consultative body between museum and ‘community’, and the intention was also for the curatorial team to train this group in research methods and oral history skills to produce content that would go into the museum’s first exhibitions.47 The forum formed three research groups, focusing respectively on the underground struggle, sports and music. The selection of themes for research suggests that while Red Location’s role in the struggle may have been central to its sense of place, there were also important elements of everyday life, cultural production and creativity that residents wanted to see reflected in the new space. The Coordinating Forum also took on the organisation of a series of public meetings in schools and community halls in and around Red Location to

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‘inform the community about the development and the opportunities that are coming to them’.48 These promising beginnings indicate a commitment to building the necessary structures for residents’ participation in making the museum. However, they were not sustained after the museum was opened. One or two of the forum’s members were later employed as part of the curatorial team and as tour guides, but the forum as a participatory body driving content production and consultation fell away. In the end, although the teams did collect some oral histories, these have been filed away in the museum’s records and did not find their way into exhibitions in any meaningful sense. The Hall of Columns was one of the exhibition sites that offered an opportunity to feed some of this local knowledge and residentled research directly into the displays, but ultimately was scuppered by direct interference from the mayor’s office. The Coordinating Forum ran a process of collecting names and stories from Red Location residents of people who were recognised as locally important to Red Location’s history. Some of these were relatively well known outside of Red Location, such as the activists Ernest Malgas and Raymond Mhlaba. But many were ordinary residents who were remembered primarily locally, including doctors, musicians and priests who had left their marks on the neighbourhood. This was meant to be the first iteration of an ongoing research process, which would see the regular rotation of the list of names and biographies displayed on the concrete columns. However, when the first list of names was presented to the mayoral committee, many of the suggestions were replaced to include highly placed political figures (including mayor Faku himself). Du Preez recalls that a conscious decision had been taken at the outset of the research project not to foreground the better-known names over those who may be recognised only locally; however, when the mayor visited the museum shortly before its opening, he insisted that Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba be given the first two, most prominent columns. So, despite these early limited structures for residents’ involvement, there are few places in the museum where one can directly encounter the voices of those who live around the museum and who have had the largest hand in shaping the neighbourhood of Red Location, both historically and in the present. The neighbourhood’s metis, to use James Scott’s term for the practical knowledge and

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patterns of being that are often discarded in projects of modernist statecraft, is far less apparent within the museum walls than it could otherwise have been.49

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Houses and homes The split between what happens inside the museum space and the life outside its walls is perhaps most compellingly read through the museum’s treatment and representations of home and domestic spaces, and its representations of Red Location’s housing histories. The memory boxes themselves directly reference the red iron houses of the original Red Location, with their use of rusted steel cladding. Some of the original red iron was salvaged from the old houses to construct a partially complete exhibition on Red Location’s history, although this was never finished or opened. One of the memory boxes includes a recreation of a shack interior. Although it was originally planned that the remaining original red iron cottages outside the museum would be at least partially preserved, the last of these fell down in winter storms in 2008. One lone segment of one of the cottages remains in the lee of the art gallery building, protected by a concrete embankment and a low wire fence, repainted in the green, gold and black of the ANC. And yet, many in Red Location have lived until recently – and several still live – in the types of shacks ‘memorialised’ in the museum and presented as history. The Red Location Cultural Precinct’s own complicated role in the project of ‘formalising’ and ‘upgrading’ Red Location is not interrogated anywhere within the space, although it has certainly been intensively questioned and contested outside the museum walls. In the exhibits related to housing and the built environment, the museum sits uncomfortably between reflecting on the realities of Red Location’s histories of marginalisation and resilience, and the aestheticisation of poverty. These issues are highlighted in the memory box containing a recreated informal shack interior (figure  11). Visitors enter the space through an alleyway, with clothes hanging out to dry and an old sanitation bucket – which, as we have seen, remained in use in Red Location until very recently. The interior is softly lit, as if by candles or a paraffin lamp, papered with newspaper and cardboard for insulation. The room contains

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Figure 11  Recreated shack interior in one of the ‘memory boxes’.

a single bed with a yellow bedspread and a few sparse items of furniture. With no text or interpretive elements, the space is entirely decontextualised. The original intention of this space, according to Du Preez, was quite the opposite of the ahistorical representation of poverty for a tourist audience that it now reflects. In a report following the 2013 closure of the museum, Du Preez noted that this exhibition was intended to prevent tourists from wandering into residents’ nearby homes in search of ‘authentic’ photographs. This regular invasion of privacy and dignity had been causing enormous resentment and further straining residents’ relationships with the museum, and the shack interior exhibit was meant to alleviate this. The exhibition was initially accompanied by a programme of public conversations and interpretations led by ‘struggle veterans’ from the area, but this was discontinued in 2008 owing to lack of funding.50 The shack exhibition invites comparison with an older exhibit on squatter movements and housing histories, which opened at MuseumAfrica in Johannesburg in 1992. For the exhibition Birds in a Cornfield, MuseumAfrica purchased two complete shacks along with their contents, one from the Nyambose family in Thokoza on the city’s East Rand and the other from the Mbubana family in Alexandra, to the north. As Annie Coombes has noted, the

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e­ xhibition was met with criticism as ‘paternalistic’, given that these shacks – which remained lived, everyday reality for millions of South Africans – were placed in the realm of ethnography and ascribed to history through being placed in the museum space. However, through text and sound as well as the regular presence of Sam Nyambose to talk to visitors about his former home, the exhibition did provide some historical contextualisation as well as a layer of co-authorship by someone who had lived this reality.51 Birds in a Cornfield provoked the question of what it meant to exhibit conditions in a museum that are not yet close to being within the realm of ‘history’. In Red Location, meanwhile, it is not clear whether to read the shack interior as a representation of the past or as an ethnographic interpretation, a glimpse for a tourist audience into the lives of ‘others’. At the same time, its role in preventing the invasion of residents’ privacy by visitors – arguably a much more unethical aestheticisation of informal living ­conditions – ­illuminates the ambivalence of an institution that draws tourist audiences into a space of poverty in the name of ‘development’. While the exhibit may draw the tourist gaze into the mediated space of the museum and away from people’s homes, it does so without fundamentally troubling or destabilising this gaze. The last remaining section of one of Red Location’s original cottages stands sheltered in the lee of the new art gallery (figure 12). The house has been conserved, ‘cleaned up’ and repainted and now forms part of the museum precinct, the last material remnant of the built structures that gave Red Location its name. Conservation architect Stephen Townsend wrote a report in 2008 on the significance of this and the other three extant red iron cottages, along with a set of recommendations for their material conservation and rehabilitation.52 The single cottage that survived the winter of 2008 was, at the time that Townsend conducted his research, the only one that was still inhabited and consequently was in the best condition of the four remnants. As Townsend points out, these houses were of course not the same houses that had been built from the remnants of barracks in De Aar and Uitenhage in 1903 – they were composite structures, encrusted with the additions and removals of time, living objects that had accrued the marks of a century of building, living, remaking, patching up and making do. Although by this time they were certainly not fit to be comfortably lived in, these structures

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Figure 12  Last remaining fragment of original Red Location housing.

also stood as testaments to the resilience and the contingent strategies that had characterised life in Red Location since its inception. Any conservation or preservation plan would have to be acted on quickly if the houses were to be saved. This did not happen, resulting in the loss of all but one of the cottages when they fell down in heavy rain and wind in the winter of 2008 (figure 13). This single, century-old remaining fragment of a house is now the only representative of what was once here. It has formally exited the space of everyday life and entered the space of ‘heritage’. This is important because it is rightly recognised as a significant artefact: but by being inscribed within museum space it also enters the lexicon of history, removed from the shacks and dilapidated houses that still characterise much of Red Location and its surrounds and becoming a representation of the past rather than a living element of that past. The supposed material ‘authenticity’ of the cottage is compromised by the addition of a layer of green, gold and yellow paint – the colours of the ANC – rendering the structure not only renewed but also remade. Some contextualisation of Red Location’s fraught housing histories is provided in a set of English, Afrikaans and Xhosa text panels mounted outside the art gallery building, near the surviving original red iron cottage. The text is accompanied by black and white

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Figure 13  Original cottages after collapse. These have since disappeared entirely.

images of the original houses and some of the families who lived in them, and a series of aerial photographs detailing the changes to Red Location over the last two decades. The text outlines the early establishment of Red Location and the process by which the original barracks were built and later fell into disrepair. However, there is no mention of more contemporary histories of displacement, struggles over housing or services, or the contestations around the building of the museum and art gallery precinct. Thus, even as it preserves part of Red Location’s history as reflected in this remnant of its historic built environment, the museum avoids critical engagement with its own position in that history. The complex social realities and everyday practices of Red Location remain concealed by a discursive veneer of ‘development’ and ‘transformation’.

Expanding the precinct: 2009–2013 While museum staff were trying to build relations with Red Location residents, the city’s attention turned to the construction

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of the next phase of the precinct: an art gallery and library, also intended to function as the new home of the city’s archive. This was funded via a R25 million (£1.25 million) Neighbourhood Development Partnership Grant from the National Treasury in 2007, and an additional R6 million (£300,000) from the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality. The gallery and library had always been part of the precinct plan for Red Location, but the brief was redeveloped in light of experiences with constructing and making the museum. Dojon Financial Services led a feasibility study and produced a detailed business plan outlining the financial sustainability of the new institutions.53 The 2007 business plan drew on several European case studies of cultural regeneration and cultureled urban planning, including detailed case studies and financial analyses of the Tate Modern, the Newcastle/Gateshead renewal project, the Guggenheim Bilbao and the British Library. The report also includes examinations of comparable South African projects, such as the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Newtown Cultural Precinct in Johannesburg. Although the purpose of these case studies was to serve as ‘best practice’ examples and as such they were not meant to be directly comparable to Red Location, they are located in such different historical and geographical contexts that their applicability appears, at least on the surface, to be limited. Construction on the art gallery and library buildings began in May 2009, slated for completion before the 2010 FIFA football World Cup that was being hosted in South Africa. The land on which these new buildings would stand was not empty: about 220 households living in shacks had to be moved elsewhere to make way for the new institutions. As with the museum building, it seems that primacy was given to the physical structures rather than to their programming, ­operations, or how they would function and sit within the social context of Red Location. While funding had been secured to construct the new buildings, the municipality had not set aside any operational funding. Professional staff could not be appointed because the positions needed did not officially exist on the organogram that governed the city’s staffing structure and chains of accountability. Incredibly, this process was completed only in early 2013, and it took another year to actually appoint curators and librarians – by which time the precinct had been shut down, leaving

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these curators without walls. Except for a handful of temporary exhibitions during the World Cup, the buildings remained empty and unused until the precinct was indefinitely shut down by residents in October 2013. The difficulties with these governance processes reflect the realities of running an ambitious project like this in a politically fragmented and complex space like Port Elizabeth, which have plagued almost all municipal governance and development processes: the Red Location Cultural Precinct is just one of many processes that have stalled in the face of unstable leadership and factionalisation. As a municipal entity, the Red Location project cannot be read separately from these political realities. In the time between the first proposals for the Red Location precinct and its closure, local governance was deeply affected by a power struggle between former mayor Nceba Faku, who subsequently served as regional chairperson of the Eastern Cape ANC until early 2013, and Zanoxolo Wayile, who served as mayor from 2010 until March 2013. The conflict between the two men escalated after a forensic report was released under Wayile’s watch in 2011, implicating Faku in a number of corruption scandals, including the irregular awarding of the tender for the construction of the mausoleum.54 These struggles had reverberations all the way up the party’s leadership chain, and in the wake of severe service-delivery and governance delays, the ANC National Executive travelled to Port Elizabeth to remove Wayile as mayor and replace him with eighty-one-year-old Ben Fihla. In addition, by this time the city had spent three years without a permanent municipal manager. In terms of re-establishing some goodwill for the project, one of the most important elements was the planned third phase of building, which was to include 210 architect-designed subsidised houses. These were never built. Even before the closure of the precinct in 2013, Jo Noero was expressing frustration with the delays and bureaucratic entanglements that were, in his view, keeping the housing portion of the project from going ahead: It’s just an infernally long process, with huge levels of incompetence. We started to do earthworks for the houses … But to build the high density houses, we have to get the plumbing round from the back of the house to the front, because the city wouldn’t let us use mid-block



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sewerage. And they gave us permission … The tender was let out and someone was appointed, then at the last minute the city changed their mind. So they stopped work on the site. That’s taken six months to get going again. It’s just absolutely disorganised, it’s chaotic, and I don’t blame people for getting frustrated.55

This third phase of building was also to include a theatre complex and a conference centre. As part of the planning process for these, Rory Riordan convened a review panel including several reports and expert comments to assess the current status of the precinct. Tony Lankester, then CEO of the National Arts Festival, was particularly incensed by the fact that the new library and art gallery had not yet been opened to the public. In his report for Riordan he referred to these buildings’ presence unequivocally as ‘a crime and a travesty’, and declared that ‘If I lived next door I would be forcing the doors open and squatting in there out of anger and frustration.’56 Or, as an anonymous Red Location resident told me outside the empty buildings in 2013, ‘Sometimes I think we should just go back to 1985 and burn this whole thing down.’ A year later, residents’ anger did boil over as Lankester had suggested it might, but with the opposite effect – a shutting down rather than an occupation, as new protests began to break out at the museum in 2013. The causes of these are complex and multiple, and should not be oversimplified. However, residents who participated in this protest unanimously cite the conditions in the ‘Phase 2’ block of housing as a major catalyst. These were the houses that were constructed in the mid-1990s a few blocks away from where the museum would later be built, in an unusual mode of delivery where the municipality constructed the exterior walls and roofs and then distributed building materials to residents to finish off the interiors themselves. In the intervening twenty years, these houses had begun to crumble to pieces, and some had remained half-finished amidst accusations of theft of building materials and unfair distribution methods. The housing issue, however, was one of several less well-defined issues that came to the surface in this period, including residents’ feelings that the museum had not provided any palpable, direct benefit to them, other than to two or three lucky individuals who had managed to find permanent employment there. When the

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museum was built, the municipality made much of the fact that the construction teams were made up of rotating groups of Red Location residents, who worked on three-month short contracts and were taught basic construction skills in the process: the intention was that this would not only upskill participating residents (mostly men) but would also foster a sense of ownership over the museum.57 However, in the views of residents this had not translated into any real material benefit or sense of inclusion in the institution. The museum and the two unoccupied new buildings had become a symbolic vector for residents’ resentment at how they and their neighbourhood had been treated by the city council, and for a general sense of mistrust towards local government and state structures. The museum building was the most concrete representation of the city council’s presence in Red Location, and so this was the space that was targeted in renewed protests. A series of public meetings and conversations from June that year did little to stem rising disgruntlement. On 18 October 2013, a crowd of angry residents arrived at the museum early in the morning, demanding that staff stay away from work and that the museum should remain closed until residents’ grievances had been addressed. Most urgently, residents wanted the poorly built Phase 2 houses to be repaired as a matter of priority. Staff were ‘temporarily’ deployed to other municipal buildings, and residents and municipal officials alike thought it would be a matter of months if not weeks for this new impasse to be resolved. Seven years later, the precinct remains closed: exhibits and files in the Red Location Museum gather dust, while the brickwork paving is interspersed with weeds and litter. Every few months, an optimistic news article reports that a breakthrough has been reached, or that new negotiations have begun, before lapsing back into silence. Residents’ groups have fragmented into several different groups claiming representativity, all with slightly differing demands. The old Phase 2 housing, for now, remains in place. Although the city agreed to demolish it and replace it with new housing built to current specifications, plans for new housing were rejected by residents when it emerged that official Department of Human Settlements specifications had changed from a maximum forty-eight square metres for a subsidised house to forty square metres. This reduction in space was broadly seen as an unacceptable trade-off.

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The more time passes, the more difficult and fraught a potential reopening and revitalisation of the cultural precinct appears. Discussions with Red Location residents and those who led these renewed protests (some of whom had also participated in the 2003 and 2005 protests) reveal a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the museum precinct. Lungiswa Gitywa lives in one of the Phase 2 houses and grew up in one of the original wood and iron cottages, close to where the new library is now. He moved into his new house in December 1998, after about two years of waiting on the housing beneficiary list. Gitywa recalled that the recipients of these new houses were grateful to move out of the leaky, dilapidated cottages. However, there were problems with the new houses too – in particular, the strategy of handing them over half-complete for residents to complete themselves. Residents were given basic materials, but had to supply anything extra they needed themselves, including materials for ceilings and floors, plaster, and paint. He explains: I was told by the community leader that … the people must move into the houses because people were stealing the windows and the doors. So we were forced to come here. There was no floor: just the roof, and these four walls. So even this, I made it myself [indicating unfinished half-height wall separating living area from kitchen] … They gave us sixteen bags of cement, and 120 bricks … I couldn’t finish it with that, because I don’t know construction. I made the things wrong. I only finished these floors last year when I got my disability grant.58

In light of these conditions, the cultural precinct became a highly visible public platform for protest. But despite this, many still feel that the museum is of potential benefit for the neighbourhood, and as such the goal was never to shut it down completely or permanently. But for the museum to function as an institution within Red Location, the chasm between its role as a face of city governance and its role as an institution owned by those who live there needs to be bridged. Unpacking his feelings towards the museum on his doorstep, Gitywa explains that: People are coming here with big money but we don’t see it … but that museum is built because of us. That is why we chose to close that museum, because it is the only municipal building here. You see there is no other municipal building around us.59

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But the issues with the cultural precinct buildings run deeper than simply their visibility as representative of public institutions. They have also surfaced complex feelings around ownership of space and of Red Location’s history, the right to represent that space, and the politics of tourist voyeurism, as Lungelwa Makina points out: There is no use that the museum must be open and tourists must come and look at the museum, meanwhile we are staying in shacks. But they take those tourists and move around here as if we are comfortable and safe. So we decided to close that museum. We don’t even have one percent of people working at the museum. We know that museum is on our land, because it’s our land and nobody will tell us it’s not our land. We are born here, we are going to die here. So they must listen to what we are saying in our land.60

This rejection of the politics of space and ownership as they have played out in Red Location is not, however, a wholesale rejection of the museum itself. Even the residents who led the 2013 protest agree that the presence of the museum is a valuable asset to Red Location, and that there is value in its acknowledgement of Red Location’s history. The museum also affords visibility and dignity to these histories, acknowledged as important and necessary: [The museum] was a very good thing, because of the history of this place. You see, there are many people – even Mandela was hiding here, holding meetings here … Wilton Mkwayi was living in my area, in Block 40. His house was facing my mother’s house. So that is Red Location. It is very important for us and our children, so they can see and know where we come from. So that is why we don’t want anything that will disturb that place, we just closed it because of this problem. They need to [repair the houses], then we will open it again … Because you see, I don’t have history here in my house, even in books. The history is there. So my children and my ­grandchildren, I can show them where I come from … The Red Location, where I come from, was those wood and zinc houses. So I must show them that I was not born here [in this new house], I was born there.61 Closing the museum doesn’t mean that we don’t want the museum. We do like the museum, but we also want to benefit from it. The



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youth of Red Location, they must see – that is the only way to see the houses that we were living in. I know the house that I was living in, we know everything, but the people that were born in these [new] houses will never see it.62

These interpretations of the meaning of the museum space for Red Location indicate a powerful sense of the importance of the neighbourhood’s history. Residents are also keenly aware that while much-needed change has arrived in Red Location and dramatic further transformation is needed, these changes have also erased the material remnants of the past. Gitywa’s comment in the first of the two quotes above that ‘I don’t have history in my house’, but that the ‘real’ history of Red Location is located inside the museum, is particularly striking. But is the line between what is ‘now’ and what is ‘history’ really as clear as Gitywa believes? Arguably not: Lungelwa Makina, certainly, is drawing on another sense of history and historical belonging when she states that ‘it’s our land and nobody will tell us it’s not our land’. Another reading of Red Location’s past is that its heritage of political mobilisation and radical claiming of ownership has had a direct impact on what has happened to the cultural precinct. The cultural precinct has become a stage where interrelated issues of local politics; histories of resistance; longstanding struggle over housing, tenure and ownership; and historical claims to the right to self-determination are playing out. It is possible, perhaps, that the living heritage of Red Location as a site of struggle is more apparent now, in and around the closed museum, that it has ever been inside the walls that are meant to function as the container for collective memory.

Conclusion: Change life! Change society! From the grand claims about ‘building good civilisation’ framed in the competition brief, to the architects’ plan for catalytic long-term change brought about by a design intervention, to the tone of the periodic announcements that its reopening is imminent, the  Red Location precinct has long been an ambitiously utopian space. There is, of course, much to criticise here, as I and others have done

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elsewhere.63 Noëleen Murray has astutely summarised the disjuncture between the complex’s promises and its realities: The difference between viewing the building in its context and examining its representations in the pages of glossy architectural magazines is striking, startling even. I was not prepared for this. The building is massive and daunting in its scale and interiority, from which there is no sense of the outside … My overriding impression was one of bafflement when reading the architect’s confident assertions about the building’s presence and success.64

In written texts, media, interviews, building plans, the competition brief and the speculative architectural drawings, the impact of the development on Red Location and on the city as a whole is often described in heavily future-orientated language, regardless of whatever current realities might be. Both Jo Noero and Rory Riordan insist on the viability of the project’s long-term impacts – a better and more hopeful urban reality that needs decades to unfold, if it were only allowed to. One is reminded here of Lefebvre’s exhortation: ‘Change life! Change society! These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space.’65 But as David Harvey reminds us, no architects, planners or ambitious fundraisers can hope to enact any kind of plan without accepting that the results of their actions are in large measure outside of their control. In the case of Red Location, of course, these ‘contingent and unsought results’ have been quite spectacular and have mattered a great deal.66 While a signboard at its entrance defines the museum’s vision as a space marked by a sense of ‘community’ ownership, residents have taken ownership of the cultural precinct’s spaces in a much more direct and literal way, completely outside of the expectations of the precinct’s planners and managers. Although drawn from a very different context in the Global South, Nadezhda Savova’s description of the tensions between ‘lived’ and ‘tangible’ heritage – to use the UNESCO framings – in the Rio de Janeiro favela of Providencia provides an interesting point of comparison to Red Location.67 Much in the same way that Red Location’s status as the oldest part of New Brighton township has been central to its inscription in the spaces and language of ‘heritage’, Providencia has long been positioned in relation to tourism and urban development projects as the oldest informal  ­settlement

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in Rio. Savova unpacks two related projects: a ‘Samba City’ complex that was meant to centralise the spaces of production of annual carnival floats and costumes, as well to provide an easy centralised locus for tourism, and an official heritage trail labelled as an ‘open-air museum’. In the services of the heritage trail, public spaces in Providencia were ‘cleaned up’, often to the chagrin of residents, while other less easily consumable spaces were excluded from the trail. (Savova’s experience, however, was that tour guides did sometimes diverge from the ‘official’ script to include some of these occluded sites.) In this instance, the author argues, municipal attempts at authoring the narratives of heritage in Providencia failed to reflect the ‘disorder and incompleteness’ that characterise the lived realities of everyday urban life. This distinction between the aesthetics of a newly ordered urban environment and the lived ‘kinaesthetics’ of memory, heritage and place-making is a useful lens for reading Red Location as well. Not only has the cultural precinct failed to deliver as a development project, its spectacular but empty spaces stand in stark contrast to the lived messiness and complex practices that are taking place outside and around it. The cultural precinct is a powerful reminder that heritage is not service delivery, and cannot be approached as such. This technocratic approach to ‘delivering’ heritage is common in South African municipalities, in scenarios where a bureaucracy exists that is (at least in theory) equipped to produce the kinds of things that can be ticked off on a spreadsheet – roads, drains, houses, electric infrastructure and so on – but cannot deal with the intangibles of memory, meaning and history. To deliver a monument is not to deliver a place or a practice of memory; to deliver an award-winning museum building is not to safely contain a neighbourhood’s past within its walls. In the absence of collective ownership and memorial practice, the museum building has been rendered an empty ruin. This is further complicated by the fact that the museum and the cultural precinct complex were never intended to be just a site for memory and memorial practice. They were also in a very material sense an economic and social development project, engaged in the project of what Vanessa Watson has called ‘making proper communities’. Watson discusses this view specifically through the provision of formal housing, one of the core points of contestation in Red Location. These ideas of development and the remaking

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of the post-apartheid city are rooted in notions of modernity and progress; but, Watson notes, they often fail to account for the ways in which people ‘actually respond when confronted with attempts to impose particular forms of modernity; especially programmes which impose change in the use and control of territory’.68 In Red Location, protesting residents have revealed the fissures and fragmentations in this idea of the ‘proper community’ as the recipients of an extremely top-down form of development.69 Yet, this is not to argue that ambitious, creative and beautiful urban design and architecture or transformative, risky approaches to public history do not belong in historically neglected spaces. In a country and a city with such deeply rooted histories and remnants of segregation and its brutality, there is no question that transformative thinking and resources are needed. These transformations, however, must be multiply authored and rooted in existing practices, histories and cultures of memory. And, in many instances, these remain visible – not just in Red Location but in many other parts of the city – embedded in ordinary spaces, far removed from attempts to institutionalise memory. In the chapters that follow, I turn away from the state-led enterprise of memory to think through some of the messy, everyday sites where the past bubbles up into the present, in the face of attempts to safely contain it or, in some cases, to write it out of public space altogether.

Notes  1 Maynard W. Swanson, ‘The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–1909’, Journal of African History 18, no. 3 (1977): 387–410.   2 Peter B. Rich, ‘Ministering to the White Man’s Needs: The Development of Urban Segregation in South Africa 1913–1923’, African Studies 37, no. 2 (1978): 177–92.   3 Raymond Suttner, ‘The African National Congress (ANC) Underground: From the M-Plan to Rivonia’, South African Historical Journal 49, no. 1 (2003): 129.   4 Raymond Mhlaba, Raymond Mhlaba’s Personal Memoirs: Reminiscing from Rwanda and Uganda (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 2001), 84.  5 Baines, History of New Brighton.

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 6 Mhlaba, Personal Memoirs.   7 Suttner, ‘African National Congress (ANC) Underground’.   8 Lungelwa Makina, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Red Location, 6 March 2013. PEBCO is the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation, one of many urban civic organisations active in the 1980s. The role of PEBCO is outlined in more detail in chapter 5 in relation to protest action of the 1980s. COSATU is the Congress of South African Trade Unions, an alliance of trade unions opposed to apartheid. COSATU was important to workers’ struggles in the 1980s, advocating for a non-racist, non-sexist society and for workers’ rights. COSAS is the Congress of South African Students, a politicised student movement drawing membership largely from secondary school students. It is probable that Makina is conflating dates or specific trade unions in this account, as COSATU was formed only in 1985; however, from her narrative it is clear how central COSATU and youth organisations such as COSAS were to young people’s experience of being in New Brighton at this time.  9 Lungelwa Makina, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Red Location, 6 March 2013. Omgekrap is Afrikaans, meaning ‘in a mess’, ‘turned upside-down’ – literally, ‘scratched around’; krap is Afrikaans for ‘dig through’, ‘mess up’ – literally, ‘scratch’. 10 The term ‘coloured’ in South African nomenclature refers specifically to people of historically racially mixed descent, with a distinct culture emerging in the Cape in the twentieth century. As an apartheid-era classification, the term is contested. Nonetheless it remains broadly understood, claimed and used in South Africa, and is not generally seen to be offensive. 11 Noble, African Identity. 12 Albrecht Heroldt Architects, ‘Competition for the Transformation of Red Location’, competition brief booklet (Port Elizabeth: Municipality of Port Elizabeth, 1998). 13 Albrecht Heroldt Architects, 22. 14 Albrecht Heroldt Architects, 10. 15 Jo Noero, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Cape Town, 12 February 2014. 16 Jo Noero, ‘Competition Winners: Noero Wolff Architects’, SA Architect, June 1999, 19. 17 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, vol. 12 (New York: Routledge, 2012); Lisa Findley, Building Change: Architecture, Politics and Cultural Agency (London: Routledge, 2005). Quote from Findley (drawing on Huyssen), p. 144. 18 Gary Baines, ‘The Politics of Welfare: The Provision of Housing and Services in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, c.1920–1944’, Kronos 22, no. 1 (1995): 87–114.

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19 Noëleen Murray, ‘Architecture Dreaming: Forms of Practice in Architectures of New Museums Post 1994’, in Healing through Heritage and Memorialisation, 19–20 March 2013, ed. Johan Lemmer (Port Elizabeth: NAHHP/SADRAT, 2013). 20 Kuljian, ‘Congress of the People’. 21 New Brighton Concerned Residents Group (NBCR), interviewed by Naomi Roux, Red Location, 9 March 2013. 22 Port Elizabeth City Treasury, circular no. 11/2000, report to members of Transitional Local Council, 17 March 2000, Red Location Museum archives. 23 Dag Sundelin to Port Elizabeth City Council Department of Administration, correspondence, 11 February 2000, file ‘Red Location 2004/2005’, Nelson Mandela Bay Recreational and Cultural Services records. 24 Port Elizabeth City Council, Administrative and Finance Executive Committee meeting minutes, 23 May 2000, document no. 7/2/8, Nelson Mandela Bay Recreational and Cultural Services records. 25 Discussion with NBCR, facilitated by Naomi Roux, 9 March 2013. 26 NBCR, ‘Isikhalo Sabahlali Balapha Kwilali Ebomvu’, 2003, NBCR records, translated by Ntobeko Qolo, 2013. 27 NBCR. Jimmy Tutu was the ANC ward councillor for New Brighton Ward 15, the local government district where the cultural precinct is located. 28 Max Matavire, ‘Court Frees Red Location Protestors on Warning’, Herald, 18 September 2003. 29 Mbulelo Gidane, official correspondence with Malcolm Langson and Maurice Mangena, 18 September 2003, Red Location Museum records. 30 Luvuyo Bono, ‘Report of the Commission of Inquiry Appointed to Investigate Allegations Made against the Branch Executive Committee in Ward 15’, report, 2003, NBCR records. 31 Bono. 32 Max Matavire, ‘Red Location Residents Trash Ward Councillor’s Office’, Herald, 8 October 2003. 33 Sithembiso Makina to Nelson Mandela Bay Muncipality, personal correspondence, 4 January 2005, NBCR records. 34 Jimmy Matyu and Nomahlubi Sonjica, ‘Red Location Residents Clash over Houses’, Herald, 30 March 2005. 35 Red Location Museum security report, handwritten by guard on duty, 6 November 2005, Red Location Museum records. The toyi-toyi is a militant dance of protest, particularly linked with images of protest from the 1980s but still widely used as part of collective action.

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36 Christopher Du Preez, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Port Elizabeth, 22 March 2012. 37 Gcinibandla Mtukela, police affidavit, 7 November 2005, Red Location Museum records. 38 Quoted in Nomahlubi Sonjica, ‘Housing Project in Red Location Finally Launched’, Herald, 16 October 2006. 39 Jimmy Matyu, ‘First Lady Approves Oom Ray’s Resting Place’, Herald, 24 February 2005. 40 Max Matavire and Bianca Capazorio, ‘Power Struggle Muddies the Waters as Red Location Museum Tender to Be Probed’, Herald, 1 August 2005. 41 Christopher Du Preez to Gcinibandla Mtukela, email correspondence, 13 October 2005, Red Location Museum records, accessed courtesy of Christopher Du Preez. 42 Quoted in Dineo Matomela and Max Matavire, ‘Furore Grows over Faku’s Plan to Dig Up Oom Gov’, Herald, 23 January 2006. 43 Quoted in Helga Van Staaden, ‘Govan Mbeki Reburial Called Off’, Die Burger, 23 January 2006. 44 Quoted in Max Matavire, ‘Museum Opening to Go Ahead without Reburials’, Herald, 15 February 2006. 45 Janet Cherry, ‘Red Location Museum Review, June 2012’, in Review Panel Briefing Document: The Red Location Cultural Precinct, Africa’s Largest Cultural Precinct (prepared by Dojon Financial Services for the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality, 2012). 46 Gary Baines, ‘The Politics of Public History in Post-apartheid South Africa’, in History Making and Present Day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa, ed. Hans Erik J. Stolten (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007), 181. 47 Pumla Mngadi-Mntanga, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Red Location, 22 March 2012; Vuyisile Pandle, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Red Location, 9 March 2012; Red Location Cultural Centre Working Group committee meeting minutes, 3 November 2004, Red Location Museum records. 48 Pumla Mngadi-Mntanga to Christopher Du Preez and Nonceba Shoba, official correspondence, 16 February 2005, Red Location Museum records. 49 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 50 Christopher Du Preez, ‘The Role of Architecture in South Africa’s Unequal Society: The Closure of Red Location Museum as a Case Study’ (unpublished report, 22 October 2014), Microsoft Word file.

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51 Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 52 Townsend, ‘Numinous Relics’. 53 Dojon Financial Services, ‘Red Location Phase 2: Business Plan’, Dojon Financial Services records (Port Elizabeth, 2007). 54 Kabuso CC, ‘Final Report: Forensic Audit Investigation into the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality’ (report prepared for Eastern Cape Department of Local Government and Traditional Affairs, Bhisho), 2010. 55 Jo Noero, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Cape Town, 12 February 2014. 56 Dojon Financial Services, ‘Red Location Cultural Precinct Review Panel, 31 July – 1 August 2012: Report on Discussions’ (Nelson Mandela Bay, 2012). 57 Findley, Building Change. 58 Lungiswa Gitywa, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Red Location, 20 January 2014. 59 Lungiswa Gitywa, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Red Location, 20 January 2014. 60 Lungelwa Makina, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Red Location, 20 January 2014. 61 Lungiswa Gitywa, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Red Location, 20 January 2014. Wilton Mkwayi was a trade unionist and Umkhonto weSizwe leader (‘Spear of the nation’ – the armed wing of the banned ANC that emerged in the 1960s). He was charged with treason and sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island in 1964 in the same trial that led to the imprisonment of Raymond Mhlaba, Govan Mbeki, Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. 62 Mxolisi Ndovane, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Red Location, 20 January 2014. 63 Naomi Roux, ‘“A House for Dead People”: Memory and Spatial Transformation in Red Location, South Africa’, Social and Cultural Geography 19, no. 4 (2018): 407–28; Marta Montanini, ‘Equality without Redistribution: Development Politics and Heritage Commodification in Red Location, South Africa’, Sociétés Politiques Comparées 42 (2017). 64 Murray, ‘Architecture Dreaming’. 65 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 66 Harvey, Spaces of Hope. 67 Nadezhda Dimitrova Savova, ‘Heritage Kinaesthetics: Local Constructivism and UNESCO’s Intangible-Tangible Politics at a Favela Museum’, Anthropological Quarterly 82, no. 2 (2009): 547–85.



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68 Vanessa Watson, ‘Engaging with Difference: Understanding the Limits of Multiculturalism in Planning in the South African Context,’ in Murray, Shepherd and Hall, Desire Lines, 72. 69 Montanini, ‘Equality without Redistribution’.

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Forced removals and landscapes of memory

The shape of memory: Forced removals in Port Elizabeth Port Elizabeth, like all South African cities, has been indelibly shaped by forced removals, many of which long predate the infamous Group Areas Act of 1950. The earliest of these were the ‘location’ removals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under British rule. Displacement was a regular feature of ­twentieth-century life in the city, under the auspices of ‘slum clearance’ and an ostensibly liberal housing policy for those streaming into the city in the face of rural displacement and hardship. By the time the Group Areas Act was passed in 1950, most black urban South African residents were already living in townships on the edges of cities, with a few well-known exceptions such as Sophiatown in Johannesburg. The majority of these early forced removals were undertaken under the 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act, which established the principle that cities were ‘white’, colonial territory, and under the 1934 Slums Act, which empowered municipalities to force residents out of areas designated as ‘slums’ without necessarily having to provide them with housing elsewhere.1 In Red Location, lifelong resident Nomangesi Sitole recalls stories told by her parents about their removal from Richmond Hill (now a thoroughly gentrified, trendy strip of coffee shops and bars) to Red Location, insisting that I record Richmond Hill’s older name of EmaXambeni: They had moved from Richmond Hill. EmaXambeni: I would like you to write that name, EmaXambeni. They moved from EmaXambeni to the Red Location. The spelling is e-m-a-x-e-m-b-a-n-i. It was forced



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removal, they had to move. I think it was in ’36 or ’37, because my mother told me they had this house in New Brighton, which was the first batch of these cement houses to be built, and that was in 1938.2

As a result of the restrictions on movement and working life placed on black residents, particularly men, Port Elizabeth’s general patterns of racial segregation had been well laid down by the 1940s. In these first decades of the twentieth century, many people resisted moving to New Brighton, which was seen as distant, desolate and overly controlled by the state. Many chose instead to go to the suburb of Korsten, to the north of the city, halfway between the centre and New Brighton. At this time Korsten was not yet officially incorporated into the city’s boundaries, and so those living there could escape some of the strictures of life in the new township. In 1956, Korsten was declared a ‘coloured’ area under the Group Areas Act; black residents were forced to go to the new township of Kwazakele, while those displaced from mixed-race inner-city areas like South End and Fairview were moved in to take their place. Janet Cherry cites a moving interview with ANC Women’s League campaigner Hilda Tshaka, who was among the last to leave Korsten in the 1950s, which is worth quoting at length for its powerful sense of what this move meant to those who experienced it: I can’t remember the year I moved, but I was one of the last group to move because I resisted being moved. There were a lot of people who did not want to leave Korsten; there were many people who said they are not going to Kwazakele, and they wanted the government to build houses in Korsten for them … It was better to stay in Korsten because Korsten at that time was very free, people had their own plots, there was no control from any government department. It was not restricted like Kwazakele. People could make dwellings as much as they wanted, and they could accommodate people for meetings and so on … Here at Kwazakele we couldn’t do that. Korsten was not controlled by the Native Affairs department. We could develop our houses, make them big, and have a big yard. It was a big area, not like today in Kwazakele where you can’t bring people to your house for a meeting; here you can’t do a thing without being watched by other people. There was a very good spirit in Korsten.3

By the end of the 1950s, most black urban residents in South African cities had been displaced to new apartheid townships,

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if they had not already been moved under older legislation. In the 1960s and 1970s, the state’s attention turned to ‘mixed’ neighbourhoods in a new wave of removals that affected mainly (but not exclusively) Indian and coloured residents in places like District Six in Cape Town; Fietas and Fordsburg in Johannesburg; and South End, Fairview, North End and Overbaakens in Port Elizabeth. Between 1965 and 1985, an estimated 860,000 people were forcibly removed under the Group Areas Act in South Africa.4 The trauma and alienation of these experiences cannot be overestimated: besides the material loss of homes, communities and livelihoods, forced removals rendered people effectively invisible in relation to the cities they called home.5 The process of implementing the Group Areas Act unfolded over years, in some cases decades – although it is often remembered as a single, devastating moment of rupture. In Port Elizabeth, the removals of the 1960s and 1970s progressed much more slowly than the removal of black residents had in the 1950s – an effect of black urban residents’ longstanding positioning as ‘outsiders and temporary interlopers’,6 while there was less pre-existing segregation in place between people who the state had classified as ‘Indian’, ‘coloured’ or ‘Cape Malay’.7 In Port Elizabeth, the most iconic space of forced removal was South End, although it was certainly not the only such space. Inge Salo, for example, has written a compelling dissertation on memories of removal from nearby Fairview.8 But the story of South End has become inscribed in public memory in the city through the presence of the South End Museum, as well as several other less visible and less public representations of memory. Similarly to oral histories and recollections of the more famous District Six in Cape Town, many former residents describe South End as a ‘melting pot’ or a prototype for the ‘rainbow nation’. These memories often accompany nostalgic recollections of South End as a safe, close-knit, ‘homely’ space. They are also coloured by the fact that most people for whom the removals are in living memory were children or young adults when they took place. Manoura Abrahams was just sixteen when her family were moved from South End in 1967. She remembers: We stayed next to Indian people, across the road were whites, then there were Malays, and we had Christians and so on. It was a mixed



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rainbow nation, but a … how can I say? A family. There was no such thing as today, that you have to lock your doors and everything, no violence.9

These descriptions are nostalgic, but this is not meant pejoratively: this nostalgia is a powerful indicator of what was lost and what is missed.10 Many residents contrast the closeness and the intimacy of everyday life in South End before the removals with the impersonal, bland nature of the spaces to which they were sent, and the loss of networks of community leading to unfamiliar feelings of insecurity or even danger. Writing on the 1955 forced removals from Sophiatown in Johannesburg, Jennifer Beningfield draws attention to representations of the area prior to its destruction that emphasise its proximity to the city, as well as the physical and emotional proximity of residents to one another. This possibility of encountering another and of coming up against difference is at the heart of what it means to be urban, to belong to the city and to have the city belong to you. Nostalgic images and recollections of life before removals evoke a time when the boundaries, although present, were compressed into the thickness of a wall, the width of a street or the thinness of a property line. It was this closeness, intimacy and the invisibility of boundaries between people of different racial groups that the Group Areas Act sought to alter.11

As a working-class space of racial mixing and blurred boundaries, South End had to go. Its position next to the central city and adjacent to the harbour made it prime property, which in the schema of apartheid planning rendered it automatically ‘white’ space.12 And so, between 1965 and 1975, South End was virtually emptied as the city council, on behest of the state, forced residents to move to the racially circumscribed neighbourhoods of the so-called ‘Northern Areas’: Malabar, Korsten, Gelvandale, Salsoneville, Kabega Park and New Brighton. From a population of 12,400 in 1960, by 1980 there were only 1200 people remaining. Almost all the existing houses were demolished, although some religious landmarks and public buildings escaped destruction, including a Hindu temple and two mosques that still remain today.13 New street layouts were charted and from the early 1980s, townhouse complexes and apartment blocks obliterated most of what remained of the old landscape (figure 14).

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Figure 14  South End’s erasure, c.1975.

Group Areas Act legislation had caused major anxiety for residents since its passing in 1950, but South End was declared ‘white’ only in 1963 and the first expropriation notices were sent out in May 1965. In 1997 – thirty years later – three former residents published a book collating images and narratives of everyday life in South End and the removals. The authors’ description of the process of waiting for the notices and then waiting out the removals is nothing short of apocalyptic: These eviction notices wreaked havoc in the community and were the cause of great uncertainty and widespread anxiety. The uncertainty and worry went on for many months and even years as people waited for the dreaded day to arrive … As the people sat down to wait, for what was for many something akin to an execution day, the people became obsessed with the impending removals, and for many of the older people the eviction notice was a death notice. Many of the elderly people died of a broken heart before the bulldozers and trucks arrived.14

The way the removals played out over a long period of time has a cyclical feel, with many similar descriptions of residents

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r­ emembering themselves looking anxiously forward at the impending moment of disaster. Of course in most cases this was not a moment, but rather a long series of events and anticipations that played out, in some cases, over years. Those who were among the last to leave also had to endure watching the suburb gradually emptying, with houses being broken down as their occupants moved out. The late Sidney Prince, who worked for the last years of his life as a tour guide at the South End Museum, was removed from South End twice: once in 1966, and again with his young family in 1972. He remembers: I was moved out in 1966. I got married in 1967, and I came to stay here for the second time, telling myself ‘To hell with you, I’m back here!’ I was able to move back because I came to stay with my parents-in-law. They were still living here, they didn’t break it down here yet … Lo and behold, in 1972 they moved me out again, me and my wife and two kids.15

In many recollections, small sensory details take on a ­foreboding quality in residents’ telling. Ismaiel Nakerdien, for example, explains that he remembers that he, his wife and two children must have left South End in 1970 because this was the year stamped on their new dustbins when they arrived at their new home in the Northern Areas. The authors of South End As We Knew It describe the symbolic and literal silencing of South End’s everyday bustle, using the changing sensory experience of the place to evoke a deep sense of loss: And when the day came, the people moved … When the last family had moved out, when the laughter and cries of the children had slowly died; when the excited gossip had trickled to a halt; when the calls of the fishermen and other hawkers were finally silent – the bulldozers moved in and levelled the area.16

The confluence of the emptying out of the landscape with the destruction of lived, social space and networks of South End pervades recollections of this period. Many people remember the textured and multisensory spaces of everyday life in stark contrast to the anodyne, desolate new spaces in the so-called ‘Northern Areas’ of the city where people were sent, where social networks were suddenly, devastatingly absent and where one could no longer rely on

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familiar landmarks for physical and emotional orientation. Ismaiel Nakerdien remembers the confusion of not knowing how to find his way to work on his first day of living in this new space: So all the people were here. In this area there was nothing. Bush. Nothing. So by the time we came out, the Sunday that we moved in here, I didn’t know … I must go to work. It was raining the Sunday, Monday morning was overcast, and I didn’t know where the bus stop was. I didn’t know where I was, exactly. Anyway I knew I can’t go up, because there’s nothing there – I must walk down. So I walked down and I saw a pole up there, a pole and a few people standing there. When I got close to it I saw that it had written in yellow letters, ‘Bus Stop’. So that’s how I found out where the bus stop was. That’s what it was when they plakked you in this place, with nothing … There were no shops. It was tough, really. There was one school over there. So basically, they had to start all over again.17

For Ismaiel Nakerdien, his primary memory of arriving in the Northern Areas is one of spatial dislocation, of the difficulty of navigating this new material and symbolic landscape in which he had, as he put it, been plakked – in Afrikaans, placed, suddenly and against one’s will, with an added connotation of being stuck. For Manoura Abrahams, her memory of spatial dislocation is much more powerfully related to an attendant social dislocation, and to the difficulty of traversing and navigating not just spatial but also emotional distances very different to her memories of the dense, convivial social space of South End: I was sixteen years old when we moved here to Salt Lake, in 1969. It was still very – there was no Cleary Park, no shops, nothing – it was just houses. I was so sad the day we left, I will never forget. I will never forget. We had these bosom friends of ours, opposite us was a house full of children, they had lots of brothers and sisters … We called it a lekker house, where you can just walk in, it was full of love and that. And then they moved first, and the lorry came. They moved to Malabar, and so they moved and we stayed on. It wasn’t long that we moved, also. And that is how we split. And then being here: there were no taxis hey, no buses. Nothing.18

These memories, and many others like them that emerged in interviews conducted for this book as well as in oral history projects run by the South End Museum and other researchers, highlight

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the multiple and at times contradictory ways in which the removals are remembered. They are recalled simultaneously as sudden and traumatic ruptures but also as painfully long and drawn-out processes of emptying out and dreadful anticipation. They speak both to a collective trauma and to intensely personal experience, revealing the deep complexity of remembering and speaking about South End – and the many other spaces like it, in Port Elizabeth and further afield. Forced removals in Port Elizabeth remain close to the surface of living memory, whether reflected in formalised spaces of commemoration or not. The South End Museum has become the de facto ‘container’ for this memory. But there are also many other spaces and practices where this memory and its aftermaths find a home. Traces of this history live in marks and ruins in the landscape itself, in practices of walking and talking, and in informal memorial practices. In this chapter I unravel some of these strategies, and describe a 2015 exhibition project by myself and writer/­photographer Yusuf Agherdien called Double Vision that used photography and oral history to negotiate the erasures and persistence of these spatialised memories of loss. The various strategies adopted in these multiple formal, informal, officially recognised and marginal spaces to remember this and other neighbourhoods reflect the multiplicity of memories and narratives of the neighbourhood, and the extent to which these are intricately interwoven with the physical spaces of the city. In many senses this is heritage which resists ­‘memorialisation’ in the traditional sense, for which a museum space is important but also fundamentally inadequate. This is not memory that can safely be located and stored in the past; it rises up, ghost-like, from street corners and old foundations, lodged in kerbstones and in maps, defying reification and forgetting.

The South End Museum The South End Museum, located in a late Victorian building near the city’s harbour, faces the ocean across busy Humewood Road. It is walking distance from here northwards to the city centre, and southwards to the popular beaches and hotels of Summerstrand. In the museum, two floors of exhibitions span the history of South End,

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experiences of forced removal and their aftermaths. The various rooms of the museum have evocative names: the Hall of Memories contains a permanent photographic exhibition made up of large wall-mounted panels and hanging blocks of images. Next door, the Hall of Shame, also used as a meeting and public event space, contains a painted floor map of pre-removal South End, a mural painting of children playing in a South End street, and photographic banners along the sides of the hall with images of the neighbourhood during and prior to the removals. Also on the ground floor, the exhibition Home Life offers a recreated domestic interior representing a ‘typical’ South End dining and living room, with a multimedia video installation intended to bring to life a family’s experience of hearing the news of the impending removals. This ‘community’ museum is run on a shoestring budget and largely off the labour of volunteers, held together by a handful of full-time administrative staff and tour guides. Every budget and funding cycle brings a new wave of uncertainty regarding the museum’s ability to keep its doors open, and every year the institution scrapes through for another twelve months on the back of Lotto funding, grants, and uneven revenue from space rental and a recently built cafe. As such, its exhibitions are somewhat uneven – some highly polished and professionally printed, and some cobbled together from archival materials, photographs and whatever else is at hand. Heading up a small spiral staircase from the ground floor, the walls are decorated haphazardly with photographs of fishing and angling, a core economic activity in old South End, leading into a large upstairs space crammed with an immensely detailed exhibition on sports teams. A corner of this space is occupied with scale models of South End’s music and dance halls. Older exhibitions on ‘cultural groups’ associated with South End – including separate displays on the ‘Cape Malay community’, ‘Chinese community’ and ‘Indian Heritage’ – are in partial storage in an upstairs balcony space, although in earlier years these had a much more prominent position in the main ground floor exhibition space. One of the museum’s newer additions is an exhibition on the eighteenthcentury Khoi leader Dawid Stuurman, whose story the museum has adopted as part of a claiming of Khoi heritage amidst an activist movement to return Stuurman’s remains to South Africa from Australia, where he was exiled until his death. Stuurman, a veteran

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of the 1799 Khoi Rebellion in the colonised Eastern Cape, was born in the Gamtoos Valley near the missionary village of Bethelsdorp, which has today been swallowed by the so-called ‘Northern Areas’ of the city, where coloured and Indian residents were forced to live under the Group Areas Act. Formal commemorative efforts for South End in a museum context can be traced to 1988, when the then Port Elizabeth Museum (now part of the museum and aquarium complex Bayworld) held an exhibition called South End Recall, organised by the museum and the rather conservative and architecturally orientated Port Elizabeth Historical Society. The museum conducted some research into South End’s history and solicited donations of photographs from residents, but the project did not have major uptake among former residents as it was seemingly initiated by ‘outsiders’.19 The context in which this exhibition emerged is important, and very different to the context in which the South End Museum and other representations of South End were developed. 1988 was the height of apartheid, and of a particularly vehement struggle being fought in Port Elizabeth’s townships against the apartheid state and its institutions. The Port Elizabeth Historical Society’s major focus was (and remains) the city’s built and colonial tangible heritage, rather than the ephemeral forms of social history that are so important to the memories of places like South End (and other spaces of forced removal in South African cities). In contrast, much of the later memory work on South End emerged in the 1990s in a period in which social history and collective memory were being reclaimed to address the lacunae and erasures of apartheid-era commemorative forms, and specifically to recognise and valorise memories that could not be framed this way under an oppressive apartheid state. In the wake of the democratic transition of the 1990s, multiple new, small projects of memory related to South End began to pop up, seemingly independent of one another, driven by former residents or by those with strong familial connections to sites of forced removal via parents or grandparents. Yusuf Agherdien, for example, had been moved out of South End with his family as a teenager in 1972, and had been collecting photographs and artefacts related to South End and the removals since the 1970s – a life’s work. Much of this material found its way into Agherdien, Ambrose and Hendricks’ 1997 book, South End As We Knew It. While these authors were

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busy putting the book together, the artist Michael Barry was working on a series of artworks related to the neighbourhood of Fairview, which had been similarly devastated by forced removals. Christopher Du Preez, the artist who would later be the first chief curator of the Red Location Museum, held an exhibition of his paintings of South End based on old photographs of street scenes of the place where his mother and her family had once lived. It is interesting, but not altogether surprising, that there was this confluence of these disparate projects of memory at the same moment in time and at this particular moment of historical transition. Forced removals in Port Elizabeth – as elsewhere – had never been fully dealt with as a collective trauma. Commemorative work on the experiences and effects of urban forced removals was beginning to emerge elsewhere in the country too, most notably the opening of the exhibition that would become the District Six Museum in Cape Town in 1994. In Port Elizabeth, this appeared to be a moment at which the floodgates of memory could finally be opened. Du Preez recalls that while he was working on his exhibition in the early 1990s, he started receiving telephone calls from former residents who he had never met, but who had heard that he was a young artist with an interest in South End and that he had been collecting source material for his paintings. He recalls that often people would contact him not with any specific request or offering, but simply to talk – in some cases for the first time since they had moved out to the Northern Areas or elsewhere: I was phoned basically day and night … And people would be crying over the phone. It just shows you that people never dealt with it. It was there, it was always there – they just wanted to tell their stories. And all of a sudden now, there’s somebody doing something about South End. So they wanted to tell their stories, and show me their stuff, and all of that.20

Through these disparate projects, a group of people made contact with each other who were all, in their own ways, interested in establishing some form of public commemoration of South End. A committee that included Yusuf Agherdien, Michael Barry, Errol Heynes, Raymond Uren, George Ambrose and Shaheed Hendricks formed a committee that was formalised in 1999 as the South End Trust, legitimised by a public meeting of former residents at the City

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Hall. With a small grant from the city council, the trust purchased the derelict Seamen’s Institute building, which stood on the edge of South End facing towards the harbour. The museum opened in March 2001, with a small number of mainly photographic exhibitions crafted from personal archives and items donated to the museum by former residents. At the time that the South End Museum opened, sites of memory of forced removals elsewhere in the country had powerfully shaped much of the general narrative and representations of such spaces in South African cities. The best known among these were (and remain) representations of Sophiatown in Johannesburg and District Six in Cape Town. The work of the District Six Museum has been particularly influential on the strategies and approach of the South End Museum (and on ‘community museums’ in South Africa more generally). Spaces like District Six and Sophiatown occupy deeply rooted symbolic space in both a national and international imaginary, in part because both of these spaces were home to prolific artists, musicians, photographers and writers. Sophiatown was home to many writers and photographers who contributed to the famous Drum magazine in the 1950s; images and stories from the Drum era continue to circulate widely, including Jürgen Schadeberg’s iconic photographs of performers, musicians and dance parties, and the journalistic, fiction and non-fiction writing of Blake Modisane, Henry Nxumalo and Nat Nakasa, among many others. Images of a young Miriam Makeba, Dolly Rathebe and other performers have produced a sense of Sophiatown ‘style’ that remains instantly recognisable. Similarly, District Six in Cape Town – a story which closely parallels that of the less well-known South End – has been entrenched in popular imagination through the work of writers and artists who produced representations of everyday life in the neighbourhood as well as its destruction in the 1960s. Much of the land that was District Six remains as an open scar in the centre of Cape Town, and land restitution and heritage declaration processes have kept the area and its history firmly in the public consciousness.21 The District Six Museum, meanwhile, remains firmly embedded in the Cape Town tourist trail as well as continuing to engage directly with former residents and with the politics of memory in the city. As far back as 1990, four years before the District Six

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Museum opened, the writer Richard Rive commented that it was worth asking ‘why so much attention has been focused on District Six and not on the many other similarly affected areas. What about Pageview in Johannesburg, South End in Port Elizabeth and Claremont and Simonstown in the Cape Peninsula?’22 For Rive, there was a unique sense of ‘melodrama’ to the District Six removals, owing to its centrality and visibility in the city and its global links via the harbour and the city’s economy that meant its ‘vibrant, pulsating and unorthodox lifestyle … became known in the seaports of the world’.23 Undoubtedly, this sense of melodrama was experienced everywhere that such removals happened – so this does not on its own account for the politics of visibility around the District Six removals. The Group Areas forced removals of the 1950s and 1960s did not take place in global isolation. Apartheid removals as well as earlier demolitions and removals in the first half of the twentieth century were often explicitly framed as ‘slum clearances’, in a period when public health was increasingly being positioned as a challenge that could be solved through urban planning strategies.24 In South Africa, this process was intimately linked to racial segregation, especially in residential areas – and after the election of the National Party in 1948, in all spheres of daily life and work. But this was a global phenomenon too: in the mid-twentieth century, urban slum clearances were taking place in several European and American cities, often in spaces with – like Port Elizabeth – a substantial working-class population, amid social and political anxieties about the blurring of class boundaries. In South Africa, of course, these class boundaries were also intrinsically raced. As such, the forced removals of the 1950s and 1960s became powerfully indicative of the ways in which the state was able to express power spatially, through the erasure, reinscription and clearing of ‘mixed’ urban space. In District Six’s case, public representations of history are strongly connected with activist campaigns around land restitution, in particular the Hands Off District Six (HODS) campaign – a precursor to more contemporary activism about the future of District Six’s land and former residents’ ‘right of return’. The HODS campaign was founded in 1987 following a land redevelopment proposal from British Petroleum. This proposal was strongly

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opposed by former residents, for whom the district remained ‘salted earth’ and who argued that no redevelopment should take place there without their direct involvement.25 At a HODS conference in 1988 there was a call for a museum to be established in memory of the neighbourhood, and a year later the District Six Museum Foundation was established. The District Six Museum opened in 1994 with what was originally intended to be a temporary exhibition, and has remained in place at the edge of the old District Six ever since. In South End, this activist underpinning is not present in the same way in the museum, which was originated primarily as a project of memory rather than one of restitution. This is not because of a lack of activism or desire for restitution in South End, but the issues facing activists here were somewhat different to those in District Six, where the land had never been fully redeveloped and therefore remained as both a symbolic marker of loss and a potential (contested) resource for restitution. In contrast, by the 1990s South End had been almost completely redeveloped, and so it did not function as an open scar in the city in the same visible way that District Six did. As a result, activism around land claims and post-apartheid restitution processes in South End were more focused on obtaining reparations than on staking a claim to the physical spaces of the suburb in its current form. In the early 1990s, as the first post-apartheid state put in place processes for displaced people to submit land restitution claims via a centralised process, former residents of South End and other spaces of dispossession formed the Port Elizabeth Land and Community Restoration Association (PELCRA). PELCRA’s chairperson, Raymond Uren, would go on to serve as one of the founding trustees of the South End Museum. The museum itself, as noted, developed out of various projects of memory that began to emerge around the same period. The land claims process closed in 1998, so the museum – which opened in 2001 – was not directly engaged in restitution activism and organisation. In District Six, the District Six Beneficiary Trust was formed in 1997, playing a similar role in Cape Town to that of PELCRA in Port Elizabeth, and was closely linked to the work of the District Six Museum.26 While the South End Museum Trust purchased the Seamen’s Institute specifically to house the museum, the District Six Museum

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Foundation operated for years without a permanent building. Its first exhibition, in the former Methodist church that now houses the museum’s permanent collections, was intended to be up for only a few weeks: the Streets exhibition used the original salvaged District Six street signs to create a poignant installation that now sits at the heart of the museum space.27 Since then, the District Six Museum has become known for its participatory, self-reflexive approach and a curatorial method that acknowledges the inherent incompletion of any project of memory.28 With much more limited expert and academic support, a highly constrained budget, and less national and international visibility, the South End Museum has tried to incorporate some of the museological strategies of the District Six Museum into its work, albeit with variable levels of success. Its core collection at its opening in 2001 was gathered from a range of sources, including the archives of some of the existing projects discussed earlier and material from both public and private archives. While this did include some artefacts and objects, the majority of donations from former residents, as well as archival material, were photographic. The form and content of these early collections, which continue to shape the museum’s approach, had to be built around what was already available and what could be gathered from former South End residents, often gleaned from family albums and boxes of old photographs. As indicated by the outpouring of emotion and traumatic processing of memory described by Christopher Du Preez in response to his painting exhibition in the late 1990s, one of the major roles of the museum would be as a space of healing, where this traumatic recollection could be mediated and contained – and, perhaps, where the chaotic experience of memory as it is lived could be translated in the edited and structured forms of ‘history’.29 With a displaced and scattered ‘community of memory’, like the District Six Museum, the South End Museum would provide a space of return, where South End could be symbolically revisited and where these memories could be publicly and collectively acknowledged. In this sense it had the potential to act as a form of rehabilitation for a ruined and traumatic landscape – ‘the evocation of an old-new thing’, to return to Lalou Meltzer’s phrase.30



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Material traces: Photography and family Within the museum – and, as we will see, outside of it – a great deal of this ‘old-new thing’ has been constructed through the medium of photography, drawn from a combination of ‘official’ and personal archives. Within the museum, the three main permanent exhibitions on the ground floor all make extensive use of photographic material. In the Hall of Memories, the walls are papered with designed panels of reproduced black and white archival photographs, many of them collected from private or family collections and albums. These are all reproductions rather than original photographs, digitised and flattened into one composite image to cover the wall in its entirety. These panels are divided into themes: Life, Education, Churches, Sport, People of South End and Forced Removals. Each panel is fitted into a recessed alcove in the wall, and they are separated by large-format text, reading, respectively, ‘Vision’, ‘Faith’, ‘Courage’, ‘Hope’, ‘Love’ and ‘Memories’. Four long, rectangular three-dimensional blocks hang from the ceiling, bearing similarly collaged images, titled ‘Resistance Leaders’ and ‘Religious Leaders’, along with additional images of houses and street scenes. Other than these headings and gestures towards abstract values, there is no associated text, captioning or narrative contextualisation. As a result, the effect of the images in this room is cumulative and impressionistic, rather than narrative or chronological (figures 15 and 16). The photographs, many of them taken from private collections that might have included family albums or display in a family home, are for the most part everyday snapshots of the kind that one might expect to find in these contexts. The panels titled ‘People of South End’ and ‘Life’, for example, include moving images of wedding toasts; families posing outside their houses; children dressed for first communion, posing stiffly and squinting into the sunshine; a group of laughing young women; and a formal studio portrait of a serious young couple. There are also a number of street scenes: children playing football in the street, a row of 1950s shopfronts. The disembodied stairs that I encountered with Yusuf Agherdien, described in the introduction, would once have led up to the front door of one of these.

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Figure 15  View of the Hall of Memories in the South End Museum.

Up to June 2011, when these photographic panels were compiled by a professional graphic design company and installed on the walls, the look and feel of this room was rather different. While many of the same images appeared on the walls, these were originally in the form of either the original photographs or small-scale prints presented in similar format to the originals. These images were individually framed and haphazardly arranged on the walls in groups and themes. The cluster of images titled ‘Destruction’ was, in this original iteration, displayed next to a handmade ‘Dispersal Map’, where arrows indicated the various parts of the city that South End residents had to move to after the forced removals, according to their racial classification. One arrow leads off the edge of the map, to indicate those who had moved out of the city altogether or, in some cases, emigrated. This map remains in place in its original spot, but without the visual context of these images of South End’s demolition alongside it. While the current displays include no substantive text, these original clusters of photographs each included a small laminated text panel with some general context, much of it aligning with the view of South End as a close-knit, comfortable, safe c­ ommunity,

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Figure 16  ‘Life’ panel, detail of the Hall of Memories exhibition, South End Museum.

where cultural difference nonetheless translated into a kind of values-based homogeneity of character, morals and practices. The text that was originally alongside the images titled ‘Work’, for example, read: South End people took pride in their industriousness, reliability, and enterprising spirit. They earned a living through various fields of

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work. Dairies, greengrocers, fishermen, barbers, dressmakers, priests and factory workers lived side by side.

Next to the section titled ‘Destruction’, the original text explained that ‘The bitter-sweet story of the destruction of South End is also the story of the “Shame of Port Elizabeth” and portrays the depth of man’s inhumanity.’ These framing texts, as general as they are, have disappeared from the re-curated images, which now rely on the interpretation of tour guides to be understood by visitors without a pre-existing sense of South End’s history. These new displays are graphically consistent and professionally designed and printed, in contrast to the haphazard, ad hoc appearance of the original displays with which the museum opened. The new images’ large format, covering every surface of the walls and hanging from the ceiling, creates an immersive effect, with the figures in many of the images appearing to loom over the visitor from above. Yet, as large, flattened surfaces, the images have stepped away from the close engagement with the photographas-object that the original, smaller photographs may have invited. They are only really visible at a slight distance, while up close they dissolve into pixelated pure surface. Although more impressive and visually consistent, some of the intimacy has been lost in the new, more mediated form of these images, which have now exited the realm of ‘artefact’ and entered the realm of ‘image’.31 As Edwards and Hart have pointed out, traditionally photographs are read as visual texts rather than as material objects. Their forms of display, the physical nature of the paper, chemicals and ink, and the traces of their passage through time are excluded from a purely visual reading.32 These authors suggest that these three-dimensional elements, which create a sense of the photograph-as-object, are as intrinsic to meaning as the image on the photograph’s surface, and that another way to read such images is as objects of material culture as well as visual representations. In the South End Museum, the photographs have effectively been translated from photographic artefacts to two-dimensional visual representations – gaining a sense of formal design and unity of message, but perhaps losing an older layer of meaning and viewer engagement. Marianne Hirsch has noted that ‘photographs, as the only material traces of an irrecoverable past, derive their power and

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their important cultural role from their embeddedness in the fundamental rites of family life’.33 Hirsch frames the linked acts of photographing the family and the later collective viewing of these images as an act of chronicling and curating the idea of ‘family’, as a ritual of constructing and performing familial cohesion. In a related vein, Edwards and Hart tie the ritual of making and viewing such images to the physical materiality of the photograph and its means of display: these invite particular kinds of embodied interaction between viewers, and between viewer and image.34 A heavy antique family album, for example, might be spread over the laps of two people, who jointly read the images via a composite interaction with the photographs, the album and each other. Meanwhile, an image framed and placed on a wall or a shelf might invite a different kind of interaction – either as an object that might be encountered almost incidentally in passing, or conversely one that has been specifically selected for proud public display to visitors. In any of these instances, some form of translation is necessary for these images to be fully legible. Who are the people in the image? Where was it taken, and by who? What is their relationship to the person who now owns the image? In an album, this translation might take the form of captioning or notes, or it might rely on verbal interpretation and storytelling. One could read the photographs on the wall panels in the Hall of Memories as a mediated form of family album – taking a cue from the many descriptions in oral histories of the close-knit, familial qualities of remembered South End. These images, too, require some form of narrative interpretation to be fully understood, particularly in the absence of captions or text panels and in a context where the narrative of museum guides becomes especially important. As a metaphor for a family album, for museum visitors who once lived in South End the photographs often evoke a connection to a symbolic lost family home. These narratives of family and home are at the same time shaped and curated by their framing in the museum space: as Hirsch suggests, one of the functions of family photography is to construct a ‘familial mythology … an image shaping the desire of the individual living in a social group’.35 What is the familial mythology that the viewer is presented with in the museum? There is no doubt that the image presented of old South End is a carefully curated and edited one. In the images,

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the wall texts, and, often, in conversations with museum staff and volunteers, the neighbourhood is uniformly presented in socially cohesive, harmonious terms: ‘multicultural’, ‘the original rainbow nation’, a ‘close-knit community’ made up of ‘hardworking people’ with strong ‘family values’. Experiences or memories that do not fit within this frame do not appear in the museum, or indeed in any other public representations of South End. The neighbourhood definitely fostered a particular sense of community and belonging for many people – this is not to suggest that this framing is an invention. However, it is also unlikely that everyday experience was always this idyllic or unidimensional. Every community, no matter how close, has its fragmentations, its exclusions and its secrets. But this editing and framing, as Annie Coombes has pointed out in relation to District Six, is also political. The concept of an uncomplicatedly unified community existing in a state of ‘prelapsarian wholeness’ is in many respects a necessary counterpoint to the bureaucratic brutality of the apartheid state, which disavowed the possibility of community outside tightly racially and culturally p ­rescribed boundaries.36 In the view of the apartheid state, a place like South End could not and should not exist – so in this respect, the photographs and narratives in the museum work to bring ­attention to the networks, social practices and rituals of everyday life that were destroyed under the Group Areas scheme. Besides these more subtle representations of resistance through memory, the museum has also attempted to integrate the story of South End into a broader political resistance narrative. South End is positioned, firstly, in the context of forced removals elsewhere in Port Elizabeth and in other South African cities, although South End itself remains central to the museum’s representations (perhaps inviting the criticism that it erases similar stories from many other parts of the city). In the Hall of Shame, adjoining the Hall of Memories on the ground floor, banners are draped along the walls naming other spaces of removal in Port Elizabeth: Fairview, Central, Overbaakens, Salisbury Park, Korsten. On the opposite wall, similar banners name spaces of removal in other cities: Sophiatown (Johannesburg), Cato Manor (Durban) and North End (East London). More incongruous, however, is a collection of images in the Hall of Memories dedicated to ‘resistance leaders’. For the most part the figures whose images appear on this

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panel have little or no link to South End, including Govan Mbeki and the Black Sash activist Molly Blackburn, who was assassinated in Port Elizabeth in 1985. The presence of Blackburn, Mbeki and other national resistance leaders in the South End Museum serves to superficially link the museum’s narrative to larger frameworks of apartheid and resistance, thereby inscribing South End’s story into nationally ubiquitous political histories and biographies. While perhaps politically perspicacious, these representations in the South End Museum detract from the intimate histories and the emphasis on the power of everyday memory around which the museum is built.

Postmemory and images of mourning The images in the South End Museum function as family albums in multiple ways. In the most direct sense, they evoke a sense of recognition and resonance for those who remember South End and experienced its loss: many older visitors to the museum, in particular, experience them in this way. This revisitation of the past also appears in virtual space, such as in a Facebook page dedicated to memories of South End, where members will sometimes post pictures of old friends or family members, usually evoking robust discussion in the comments. But for many visitors, in particular the school groups that the museum focuses much of its pedagogical efforts on, this nostalgic memory and sense of loss can be experienced only second-hand, at a generational remove. This experience is akin to what Marianne Hirsch has termed ‘postmemory’, in the context of Holocaust memorialisation: the process by which traumatic pasts are passed down to children of survivors, who have no direct experience of this trauma but who still carry its echoes and after-effects with them.37 Postmemory is often most directly evoked by photographs, serving not only to reflect the past but also to construct it and to complicate it: ‘the need not just to feel and to know, but also to re-member, to re-build, to re-incarnate, to replace, and to repair.’38 Hirsch’s discussion of the use of photography in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, offers a useful reflection on how they are used and understood in the space of the South End Museum.

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For Hirsch, the iconic representation of postmemory in action is the Holocaust Museum’s Tower of Faces exhibition, which dominates the central space of the museum. The ‘Tower’ is a cylindrical room in which photographs of the destroyed Lithuanian shtetl of Ejzyski hover above the viewer. The images show everyday moments, scenes and snapshots that can be likened to the images that appear in the South End Museum’s Hall of Memories. If, as Hirsch does, we read the Tower of Faces as a family album, Then we are situated right inside it … When we enter the Tower of Faces, we leave the historical account of the museum and enter a domestic space of a family album that shaped a different form of looking and knowing, a different style of recognition, one that is available to any viewer and that can connect viewers of different backgrounds to one another. This is a collective and not an individual story, yet the process of affiliative familial looking fosters and shapes the individual viewer’s relationship to this collective memory: they can adopt these memories as their own postmemories.39

This imaginary identification – the ability to know vicariously, to point out that ‘my grandma has a photograph just like that’ or ‘this kitchen table looks just like ours’ or ‘Look at those 1950s outfits!’ – is similarly encouraged by the South End Museum’s rooms of photographs of the lost neighbourhood. Whether visitors  have direct, personal memories of South End as it once was or not, the museum’s wallpaper collages draw visitors into a constructed, temporary familial relationship, as if looking at an album together: these images of young strangers and destroyed places become strangely intimate.

Domestic harmony While the images on the museum walls evoke family photographs and the rituals associated with their viewing, other exhibits echo this framing with a focus on domestic interiors and the spaces of everyday family life. To return to Meltzer’s metaphor of the articulated skeleton, the South End Museum’s photographs can be read as part of this attempt to reconstruct the flesh of South End around the skeletal traces of ruined house and streets – using the

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haptic ­reflections of the photograph as a central part of this process. Inspired by the well-known floor map in the District Six Museum, the museum includes a painted floor map indicating the old streets and landmarks of the neighbourhood. One of the central exhibits on the ground floor also invites the viewer into a reconstructed interior meant to reflect a ‘typical’ South End house of the 1950s or 1960s, inhabited by a film projection that brings ghost-like images of an imagined family to occupy this domestic space. In its current form, the ‘Family Life’ exhibition is a scaled-down version of its original appearance. Prior to the re-curation of the museum in 2011, the Family Life display took up an entire room and included a replicated dining room, bedroom, living room and bathroom – almost the entirety of a house, as if viewers were being invited to step inside one of the houses in the street scenes that lined the walls (figure 17). Its smaller, adjusted version has been moved into an alcove of the room and sealed off behind a rope, reduced to

Figure 17  Detail of the Home Life exhibition before its re-curation.

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a dining-room set and a sideboard. A short film, incorporating some of the museum’s taped oral history testimonies, is rear-projected onto a Perspex screen in the centre of the room, allowing spoken memory to inhabit this ‘period room’. In South African museology, period rooms in their traditional sense are most often a feature of exhibitions related to colonial pasts – although, as has been the case globally, many of these have been reconfigured to present slightly more critical views of the past. The same is true of ‘house museums’, as extended versions of period rooms. As a local comparative example, the No 7 Castle Hill Museum in Port Elizabeth is a classic period room exhibition, meant to reflect a British settler cottage circa 1827. This was an important period of flux in Port Elizabeth’s history: in the course of 1820, approximately five thousand British citizens arrived in Port Elizabeth’s Algoa Bay, under a government-led settlement scheme intended both to alleviate rising unemployment in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and to bolster settlement numbers along the contested Eastern Cape colonial frontier.40 Many English-speaking South Africans trace family heritage back to this wave of settlement, and there is a certain cachet in being able to trace a family line back to this period: this might account for the presence of similar representations in other museums in the province, including the Albany Museum in Grahamstown and the Amathole Museum in King William’s Town. Although it draws on a rather different context and set of histories, the recreated dining room in the South End Museum fits within this museological tradition. But it can also be read in relation to replica interiors that have found their way into other museum exhibits in post-apartheid South Africa, including the recreated shacks discussed in the previous chapter. Inherent in the practice of period room curation is the ‘typification’ of time periods and ­aesthetics – that is, constructing an interior that is generally indicative of a particular time and place, rather than a faithful recreation of a specific historical room or house. Trevor Keeble has made the point that an inherent contradiction in such displays is that the curatorial hand is rendered invisible when a room is framed as a supposed slice of life, a replica of ‘how things really were’; while, simultaneously, period rooms are seldom if ever ‘authentic’ representations, often cobbled together from a range of sources and

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provenances intended to use material culture to indicate a timespecific ‘way of viewing’.41 This tension between theatrical effect, ‘authenticity’ and curatorial authorship is clearly apparent in the Home Life display. The intention of the recreated room is not to display objects which were literally recovered from South End or which survived the removals. Rather, it represents a way of life that was dismantled when South End was destroyed. This is underscored by the projected film that animates the installation: it opens with extracts from the museum’s filmed oral history project interviews, before shifting into a fictionalised account of a family gathering around a dining table to discuss the news that they would soon be evicted. The Home Life exhibition thus serves multiple purposes, as a type of ‘period room’, a filmset, a representation of traditional conservative values and a mythologised domestic harmony at the very moment that these values were threatened by the impending removals. This representation of family is highly normative, including traditional gender and age roles, with the implication that this was a ‘typical’ South End family. As in the rest of the museum, there is little space for fragmentation or for subversion. In the film, mother and daughter prepare dinner together, while father arrives home from work with the dreaded eviction notice to break the news. The text accompanying the exhibition proclaims that, despite an allowance for cultural difference, core values and priorities enabled a harmonious community. One of the principal values of South Enders was their family and their homes … always welcoming, always hospitable and always prepared. The home of a typical family in South End portrayed this in its neat, clean appearance …

Alongside a display of wedding photographs in the dining room, visitors are told that ‘the sense of family and the sanctity of marriage were of the utmost importance to this community’ – a community that, in the museum space, is clearly defined as being held together by a strong familial and religious ethos. This representation of family is heavily gendered. The cleanliness of the home and the provision of hospitality, as the preserve of women, are highlighted as central to the communal character and social cohesion of South End life. There is simply no r­ epresentation

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in the museum of any behaviours, social structures, sexualities or practices that might have deviated from this norm. As Annette Kuhn has noted in relation to the notion of ‘family secrets’ – that which is repressed in, for example, the kinds of cheerful snapshots and posed portraits that typify family albums – ‘characters and happenings that do not slot neatly into the flow of family narrative are ruthlessly edited out.’42 In this representation there is little indication of who would have lived in such a ‘typical’ house, or of how this particular depiction of ‘family’ has come to stand in for the South End community or a collective set of values. If part of the museum’s mission is the recreation of the lost home, then this raises the question – who is able to feel at home in this space and who is not? The narratives within the South End Museum work alongside publications like South End As We Knew It and more recent projects around landscape, photography and memory to create a sense of temporal cross-hatching. In many of these representations the central narrative or image is that of the dreadful anticipation of the day of removal. They draw poignantly on the receipt of eviction notices, descriptions of elderly folk who died of broken hearts before the removals could take place, or the gradual silencing of the sonic textures of community life. The reader and the viewer are thrust back into a past moment characterised by a sense of dread for the future – a future which, from our current perspective, has already come to pass and which we must therefore read both forwards and backwards.

Memory trails and ruins These temporal complexities are also visible outside the museum building, in the physical traces and remnants of long-gone streets and buildings. In some instances, the edges of old streets peter out into nothingness in the open veld: if one looks closely, the foundations and footprints of demolished homes remain just visible in the long grass, although new development is fast submerging these. Some of these ghost roads and invisible houses are represented in the painted floor map in the South End Museum, which reflects social spaces, public space, places of worship and the spaces of

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everyday life. This map is carefully hand-painted and built around localised, socially embedded geographies that have persisted in collective memory, a small act of defiance against the racialised cartographies and brutal bureaucracy of apartheid planning and policy. Not everything that once existed in South End has been erased. Some of the remaining landmarks include a century-old fig tree near the harbour, which has become an emblem of resilience; mosques and temples, including the distinctive Pier Street Mosque, once alongside a busy road but now oddly unmoored in the middle of an open piece of land; the ruins of St Peter’s Church and the steps once known as the Black Steps; and the Seamen’s Institute facing the harbour, now home to the South End Museum. For the most part, though, the original streets and houses – the urban textures of daily life – have been irrevocably lost. The images of destruction, bulldozed houses and rubble-strewn streets, in the ‘Forced Removals’ panel in the Hall of Memories serve as stand-ins for the human cost. The metaphor of the ruined structure for a traumatised body also emerges in writing on District Six. The artist Daniel Mathews, for example, recalls watching District Six be torn down in the late 1960s: The elderly could be seen wiping their eyes as tears flowed freely, not because of flying dust, but because of the deep hurt as precious memories were being ground to dust … One day a sad faced fellow told me ‘Jy sien Mister, soos die geboue lyk afgebreek end stukkend, so voel ons ook so.’ [You see Mister, just like those buildings look torn down and broken, that is also how we feel.]43

Memories of South End, then, are deeply embedded in the physical form of the city and of the neighbourhood. Although it has effectively been erased, traces and hauntings remain as a metaphorical archive. In one stretch of open ground alongside the Baakens River, a cluster of ruins marks some of the last remnants of the residential neighbourhood if one knows what to look for: overgrown dirt tracks that fade out into the long grass, concrete slabs cracked and embedded in soil, the graffiti-covered remains of an old wall (figure 18). Although outwardly unremarkable, these sites have taken on deep symbolic significance. They are central to the museum’s guided heritage walks, and many people interviewed about their m ­ emories

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Figure 18  South End ruins in the Baakens River valley.

of South End for this book insisted on visiting the ruins with me and, in some cases, conducting interviews in and around them rather than in a distant living room or community centre. The late Sidney Prince, who passed away in 2016, developed a popular heritage walk for the South End Museum that was partially built around his own autobiography, alongside sites that were generally important South End landmarks, like the mosques and the harbour. In March 2012, Prince led me and a young trainee tour guide up one of the half-disappeared old South End roads and pointed out the footprint of his old house, on what was once Alabaster Road. He explained that this was where he and his wife made their first home after their marriage in the 1960s. A little way up the hill is the fragment of a wall, now covered in multicoloured graffiti: a penguin, ‘I ♡ PE’, ‘Biko Lives’. This was the back wall of Mackay’s Bakery, famous for its meat pies – a site pointed out to me by several former residents. In these walking accounts of memory, small sensory details become intensely important as the landscape is imaginatively repopulated: the smell of freshly baked pies, the exhilarating sense of running over the crest of a hill towards the ocean, the weight of newly caught fish hanging off a rope in your hand on the way home to your mother’s kitchen.

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But these details and textures are not visible to those without first-hand experience of them, except through the presence of an interpreter to make them legible. This is poignantly clear, for example, when Prince’s tour arrives in Victoria Park – a green space in the upmarket suburb of Walmer, adjoining South End. A picturesque wishing well at the park entrance, as Prince explains it, was a favourite spot for wedding photographs, including his own. He walks past a row of tennis courts and cricket fields, into an overgrown section of open land behind these well-maintained sports facilities. A broken concrete slab lies in the middle of the grass, in the process of being reclaimed by the weeds. Prince explains that these were once the ‘coloured’ sports fields, which fell into disuse after the removals. The broken concrete slab marks the remains of the segregated tennis court, and the empty patch of long grass was once a football field (figure 19). Prince’s emotion looking at this site is palpable. Although his role as tour guide placed him in a position where he was constantly revisiting and interpreting these ruins, there are a few moments – like this one – where he falls into silence, broken only to explain that his memories are bigger than words and that some experiences simply cannot be translated:

Figure 19  Remnants of the ‘coloured’ tennis court. The old football field is alongside.

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Oh, you will never know. What a feeling it was, you know, that we had to move, when it came to leaving South End, never, and it’s still difficult for me to explain. You’ve got to live it to sort of get this feeling in you, and really discuss it with anybody. You know, you don’t have to bother, they can see the truth coming out of you.44

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Later on the walk, he refers again to the difficulty of speaking, of giving words to his experience: I very seldom come here, I only come here when I bring people. Because I don’t really want to come here, it brings back too much. And of course like I said, this is the time when you switch off to talk, you know you just can’t say what you want to say.45

As a young man, Prince made his name in Port Elizabeth as a rising football star. His image is everywhere in the South End Museum’s Sports Wall of Fame. These ruined fields evoke a sense of not only a lost place but also a truncated youth – a sense of freedom and belonging that was abruptly cut short. On this walk with Prince, as with many other former residents, it often feels as though there are two landscapes spread out in front of us: one the physical landscape that is the only one accessible to me, and a second ghost image, a landscape of memory that is visible only to the person trying to get me to see it through the inadequate medium of language. Looking over the empty, overgrown football fields, Prince says, ‘I don’t want to speak much.’ After a long silence, he straightens his posture to claim his full height and continues: You are now looking at Sidney Prince: One of the staunch soccer players of Port Elizabeth. This is the ground that I played on. Not only me here, hundreds of other coloured, Indians, Muslims used to play on this piece of ground. And if you see what you see there [indicating the previously ‘white’ fields behind us], and you see what you see here, don’t question yourself. Because whenever we had the opportunity to play on those grounds there, we would give them what they deserved. We would get ourselves organised and play … I represented the Eastern Province from here, I captained the side in coloured football.46

These deeply felt affective responses emerge in almost every visit to South End, whether from those who – like Sidney Prince – revisit these sites multiple times, or those returning for the first time.

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Another former resident, Gregory George, had grown up playing behind his father’s factory buildings but had never revisited them until he took me there in the winter of 2013. Picking his way through the grass, he began to laugh. He had found the remains of the concrete slab that marked the back of the building and his playground. ‘I can’t believe this is still here,’ he repeated, delighted, and showed me a childhood scar under his chin where he had fallen off the steps onto this piece of concrete fifty-odd years ago: the marks of the past written not only into the landscape but also into the body.47

Double vision: Oral history and photography The leakage of past into present is demonstrated in a compelling photography and writing project by former South End resident Yusuf Agherdien, titled South End: Then and Now. In many ways, Agherdien’s life’s work has been the documentation and memorialisation of his childhood home. Agherdien’s family were displaced from South End in the early 1970s, when he was eighteen years old, and he has never stopped collecting mementoes, photographs, documents and stories of the destroyed neighbourhood. Now working in the city’s Department of Sanitation, his small office is wallpapered with maps, photographs, notes and poems related to South End. Agherdien was an early trustee of the South End Museum and, more recently, was the driving force behind a new small community museum about Muslim heritage in the Eastern Cape, which shares space with a community library behind Sabireen Mosque in the city’s Northern Areas. In 2013, Agherdien embarked on the ongoing photographic project South End: Then and Now. Thirty-two of the images from this collection formed the basis for the exhibition Double Vision: Landscapes of Memory in Port Elizabeth, which I curated at the London School of Economics’ LSE Cities in June 2015. The exhibition left London with Agherdien, to be displayed at the MBDA’s new headquarters in the restored Tramway Buildings in Port Elizabeth in early 2016, along with some ad hoc later iterations since then. The Double Vision/South End: Then and Now photographs offer another way into these double landscapes, one possible form of

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translation of the ghosts of the past that haunt the city in the present but that cannot adequately be pinned down in words. The bases for the book and the exhibition are a set of pairs of photographs, each made up of an archival image of South End from the 1960s and 70s – either just prior to or during the early part of its demolition – and a contemporary photograph taken by Agherdien, retracing the precise spot where the original photographer once stood. In the exhibition, sixteen such pairs were mounted on boards and accompanied by a short caption, including both Agherdien’s own words and a curatorial framing, jointly selected and edited by myself and Agherdien – bringing the unfolding conversation between past and present into the exhibition space (figures 20 and 21). Agherdien’s process of making these images is rooted in an embodied sense of the landscape, in which his physical movement through space is used to evoke memory. In 2013, I went with him to one of the sites he was photographing, where he explained the process of locating himself in a landscape that, for all practical purposes, no longer exists. The site we visited together was a half-constructed townhouse security complex, where some of the original streets and kerbs had been left in place to form the internal roads and medians of the complex. Despite the obviously dramatic differences between the past and present landscape before us, he locates himself by walking slowly and carefully along one of these remaining kerbs until he finds a curved corner undulation. ‘There,’ he points out, ‘That was the bus stop.’ Standing inside the old bus stop, now a parking spot, he indicates a rough square of paving in the median, a slightly different colour of concrete to the rest: ‘You can see where they took the old street lamp out there.’ The rest is a process of elimination and imaginative reconstruction. If this is the bus stop, and this is where the lamp post was, then this – pointing over the road – is the site of the shop that sold the tastiest fish and chips in the city. He holds up a printout of the double photographs to check, and of course he is correct (figure 22). These double images resonate with Martha Langford’s characterisation of photographs as ‘suspended conversations’ between past and present.48 Agherdien’s composite images serve as resumed and reorientated conversations not only with previous photographers, but also with remembered landscapes. For the viewer, these remembered landscapes are brought into sharp, poignant focus by the

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Figure 20  Walmer Road and its remnants, 1970–2013.

pairs of images, which render that which has been erased or forgotten startlingly visible. This is not a simple resumption of a paused conversation, but also a reorientation and a remaking, an ‘oldnew thing’ that is both autobiographical and collective. The twin

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Figure 21  One of the main roads through South End, now an internal street in a gated townhouse complex.

­ rocesses of silence and conversation are in constant interplay in the p exhibition. As an archive, there are many silences and erasures even in the older photographs, many of which were taken by architect and artist Ron Belling around 1970, just as South End was starting

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Figure 22  Yusuf Agherdien holds up a mock-up of South End, Then and Now, as he explains the process he uses to locate himself in the remembered landscape.

to be demolished. What might appear to be a randomly captured moment of everyday life is, in many of these images, actually an invisible moment of trauma, captured right before its erasure. For Agherdien, these images also serve as a type of forensic evidence. In one of our conversations, he carefully points out that every image pair bears some form of trace or echo, a mark that confirms that his memory of place is ‘true’ and that the old and new landscapes are in fact the same viewpoint. But these images are threaded through with silence and with the unsayable. For the Double Vision exhibition, we carefully went through all of the images together, recording stories and memories and then editing these into captions, to translate these images for the viewer beyond their representational surfaces. One of the photographs is a street scene, in which the original depicts a man leaning in the window of a car (figure 23). When we reached this image, Agherdien insisted that he was unable to frame the words to speak about it, and that I should write the caption myself based on some of our earlier conversations about it. The car, he was sure, was his uncle’s car, and the man leaning in the window was his father. The scene was

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Figure 23  View towards the Lee Ching general store. The Agherdien family home was towards the right-hand edge of the 1970 image. The area has since been developed into another gated residential complex.

shot by Ron Belling, unbeknownst to the two men, just around the corner from the Agherdien family home, now long gone. It was simply too close to home, possibly the most personal of the images in the exhibition. Nonetheless it was very important to Agherdien

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that this image was included. In the end, I did write a short caption indicating that this was once the site of the Agherdien family home, and we chose to place the image at the end of the exhibition to close the narrative. On reflection, perhaps it would have been more ­truthful in a sense to just leave it uncaptioned. As reflected in the image pairs, the landscape itself also holds spaces of silence and inaccessibility. In most instances, wielding only a point-and-shoot digital camera or a mobile phone, Agherdien was able to capture the original photographer’s viewpoint with startling accuracy, using the kind of embodied ­ memory process described earlier. In some cases, however, this was impossible – not because of a failure of memory, but because the ground itself had shifted: raised parking lots, fences, barbed wire, new highways and apartment conversions had rendered some of the sites inaccessible. The old South End Clinic is a good example (figure 24). The original is carefully composed as an architectural study, while Agherdien’s contemporary view required peering over a wall, and was blocked by a new raised parking lot, with a snarl of barbed wire creeping into the side of the image. The roof of the old clinic, now converted into private housing, just barely peeks out in the background of the image. Agherdien found some of these disrupted images disappointing, but they are also deeply poignant reflections on what has been literally and symbolically closed off from view. When Double Vision opened in London in 2015, under the auspices of a postdoctoral project at LSE Cities funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, I was apprehensive about who would actually visit. Was the story and the location too obscure for a London audience? The intention was always for the exhibition to go back to Port Elizabeth with Agherdien and to ultimately be displayed there, but this would be its first public iteration. Nonetheless we forged ahead, designed a small A5 booklet as an exhibition takeaway, and used a chunk of the funding to bring Agherdien to London for a week to run exhibition walkabouts, seminars with postgraduate students and an opening event. In the run-up to the opening, emails started to flood my inbox from former South End residents, who had caught wind either on social media or via Agherdien’s networks. Guardian Cities ran an online piece on the work in the weeks prior to its opening, including some images, that someone posted on a

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Figure 24  The old South End Clinic, now blocked by walls and a car park.

South End Facebook page – garnering a deluge of commentary and social media sharing. As it turned out, many former South End residents were now living in the UK or other parts of Europe, and a surprising number

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Figure 25  Yusuf Agherdien in conversation with former residents of South End at the Double Vision exhibition’s first iteration in London.

made their way to the exhibition opening and the Q&A events in the course of that week. The Q&A sessions, for which I had been so anxious about attendance, in the end were probably the most extraordinary experience of the week, as they turned into minireunions for former South End residents now based in Europe. The images were scrutinised closely, and stories and conversations poured out around them. At one of the events, the exhibition venue staff politely asked us to leave at closing time, after we had been there for a full two hours. The conversation moved to a nearby coffee shop, only wrapping up when its staff, too, asked the table to vacate so they could close. These conversations, in many respects, were far more important memorial practices than the images on the walls could hope to be, and the exhibition continues to spark these kinds of conversations and reflections whenever the Double Vision images have been shown in Port Elizabeth (figure 25).

The past in the present Many of the public narratives of memory of South End effectively stop at the moment of traumatic displacement. Within the South

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End Museum, for example, the only display which hints at the continued lives of those who were displaced is the ‘Dispersal Map’ in the Hall of Memories, indicating where former residents were either sent or chose to go. But of course for those who left South End forty or fifty years ago, life has continued. Most if not all surviving former residents have now spent more of their lives outside South End than within it. Although South End, and other areas of forced removal in the city, occupies an extraordinarily important symbolic space in the memories and identities of former residents, people have also had to form new social structures, new communities and new everyday practices wherever they have ended up: life, and history, did not cease at the moment of removal. Sheila and Harold Wilson live in Korsten, one of the spaces to which people were removed from South End (and, ironically, one of the first urban areas in Port Elizabeth to undergo removals of black residents in the 1930s). Since the 1970s, when the Wilsons arrived here, Korsten has undergone another layer of transformation into a largely industrial area, with only a few pockets of residential houses still remaining in isolated side streets. Like many former residents, the Wilsons speak nostalgically of the South End they remember. Sheila Wilson is quick to point out that many of their neighbours had also moved to the same street where the Wilsons still live today, and that they were able to bring with them and maintain many of the networks and the sense of community they had in South End. In fact, she remembers the Korsten of the 1970s in much the same nostalgic light with which many others speak of South End: It’s forty-one years in Korsten, we moved into these lovely flats and then to this house – because this area was nice, it was very nice. Just with these few shops, and again the curry place and food shops … The place was full of homes. It was so nice because you were near everything … We lived like a family again, and some of them was from South End too that ended up here. From South End to Korsten, I came to an area where again, there were the Christmas Eves after midnight mass, and always the parties, the doors were open – the neighbours here, the neighbours opposite … oh I missed it all when they moved out. As the area changed, people moved out.49

The Wilsons’ experience was in many ways different to that of the people who moved to Gelvandale, Malabar, or other parts of the

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so-called Northern Areas. Korsten had been settled for many years, and as an existing residential suburb – albeit with its own traumatic histories – its structure was fundamentally different to areas like Gelvandale or Salsoneville, which had been built on open land, with little thought to infrastructure or facilities. From Mrs Wilson’s experience it is clear that, while the process of being forced out of South End was bitterly traumatic, new lives and forms of community were nonetheless shaped in its aftermath. The danger of ending the narrative of memory at the moment of displacement is that places like the Northern Areas, where thousands of people came from South End, Fairview, North End, Central, Salisbury Park and other places, effectively become dehistoricised. Yet, of course, this is where the collective living memory of forced removal continues to live most strongly. Since 2011, an organisation called the Northern Areas History and Heritage Project (NAHHP) has worked to historicise and bear witness to the post-removal memories and experiences of the Northern Areas. Many of those involved with NAHHP’s work are  also in some way connected to the South End Museum, and these strands of history are seen as intricately connected thanks to the social dislocation caused by apartheid forced removals. NAHHP’s major focus, as an event to unlock the more complex histories and identities of the Northern Areas, is on a series of protests that took place in August 1990, which escalated into extreme violence and where many people lost lives, homes and livelihoods. Michael Barry, an artist and one of the founding trustees of the South End Museum, describes this moment as one that the NAHHP team hope to use to ‘unzip’ unresolved trauma in the Northern Areas, which continues to resonate today in high levels of gang activity and interpersonal violence.50 The 1990 protests unfolded over six days, beginning as a rent protest. By the end of that week, forty-nine people were dead, and several livelihoods had been lost as shops and businesses were burnt and looted. NAHHP views these events as ‘a symptomatic response to the peripheral expansion of the Northern Areas’, connected to a legacy of decades of displacements and the curtailment of freedom of movement and activity.51 Towards unpacking these events, NAHHP has been engaged in several projects over the years, including a travelling exhibition, a documentary film and a book by Colin

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Abrahams on the history of the Northern Areas. The ultimate goal is to develop some form of physical memorial or heritage centre that can continue to engage with these histories and the way they reverberate into the present in complex and unexpected ways.

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Conclusion: Dispersed and embodied memory The multiple ways in which public memory has been, and is being, constructed in South End speak to possibilities beyond the monumental, architecturally spectacular approach of the Red Location Museum, where the built structure is given primacy. In Red Location, the museum and the cultural precinct were conceived of as spaces where memory would be produced and contained within the envelope of the building. But as we have seen, memory has resisted this gathering up, spilling into the streets to the extent that the museum is unable to function as anything other than an empty monument. The realities of the present and their evocations of a not-so-distant past are simply too painful and too powerful for such a containment. In South End, the museum does serve as a formal institutionalisation of memories that remain painfully close to the surface of many people’s lives, and this smaller-scale attempt to ‘contain’ such memory has been unevenly successful. But regardless of what one might make of individual exhibitions, the museum serves as an important locus for memories that, in the absence of the physical realities of the remembered South End, would otherwise be spatially unmoored. In the scarred and erased landscape surrounding the museum, other, less visible anchors for memory lie scattered in the open veld and half-submerged in the wild grass. Others are being reclaimed by excavation and construction for new residential complexes. Many of the sites that Yusuf Agherdien photographed in 2013, the last traces of old South End, have already vanished. These ruins and traces are not demarcated as ‘heritage’ in any formal sense, and under the legal auspices of the National Heritage Resources Act (1999) are not due any formal or general protections. As traces, they are really legible only if one knows what to look for or with the help of a knowledgeable interpreter to make them fully visible. Like family photographs or like many of the images in the South

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End Museum, these landscape traces can be fully understood only in the presence of some form of narrative interpretation – or, to use Langford’s terms, as a suspended conversation. These ruined buildings and outlines of old roads are intricately interwoven with the presence of the bodies that once occupied them, and the somatic process by which they are revisited and reinterpreted by former residents. The movement of the physical body through this landscape of memory and absence evokes stories, silences, and affective and embodied responses to the flood of memory. Although this process is partly accessible through the museum’s heritage walks, and made visible in another way by Agherdien’s double photographs, I am not sure that this is really ‘public’ memory in its strictest sense: indeed, to be in its presence often feels inaccessible or even intrusive. The city is both a public archive of the past, and a deeply personal one.

Notes  1 Susan Parnell, ‘Racial Segregation in Johannesburg: The Slums Act 1934–1939’, South African Geographical Journal 70, no. 2 (1988): 112–26.   2 Nomangesi Sitole, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Red Location, 10 May 2013.   3 Cherry, ‘Politics of Transition’, 68.  4 Laurine Platzky and Cheryl Walker, The Surplus People: Forced Removals in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1985), 100.  5 Jennifer Beningfield, The Frightened Land: Land, Landscape, and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 207.   6 Christiaan Beyers, ‘Land Restitution in Port Elizabeth: Anatomy of a Relative Success’, Journal of Southern African Studies 38, no. 4 (2012): 827–45.   7 This was one of the linguistic and legal absurdities of apartheid racial classifications. People who today might refer to themselves as ‘coloured’ may have been variously classified as ‘Cape Coloured’, ‘Cape Malay’, or ‘Other Coloured’.   8 Inge Salo, ‘More than an Apartheid Loss: Recovering and Remembering Fairview, a “Lost” Group Areas History’ (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 2014).

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  9 Manoura Abrahams, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Port Elizabeth, 30 January 2014. 10 Annie Coombes has made similar observations about nostalgic memories of District Six, which often operate as forms of opposition to the bureaucratised language of slum clearance and sanitation employed by the apartheid state. Coombes, History after Apartheid. 11 Beningfield, Frightened Land, 176. 12 Shaheed Hendricks, ‘Biography of a Vanished Community: South End, Port Elizabeth’ (PhD thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2017). 13 Abdulkader Tayob has discussed a landmark court case fought in Middelburg in 1963, in which the town’s displaced Muslim community successfully took the state to court to ensure the preservation of the mosque even after removals. Abdulkader Tayob, Islam in South Africa: Mosques, Imams, and Sermons (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999). 14 Yusuf Agherdien, Ambrose George and Shaheed Hendricks, South End as We Knew It: The Story of South End Told by South Enders (Port Elizabeth: Western Research Group, 1997), 93. 15 Sidney Prince, interviewed by Naomi Roux, South End, 28 March 2012. 16 Agherdien, George and Hendricks, South End as We Knew It, 93. 17 Ismaiel Nakerdien, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Port Elizabeth, 30 January 2014. 18 Manoura Abrahams, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Port Elizabeth, 30 January 2014. Cleary Park is a local shopping centre. 19 Palesa Kadi, ‘The Group Areas Act and Port Elizabeth’s Heritage: A Study of Memorial Recollection in the South End Museum’ (master’s thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2007). 20 Christopher Du Preez, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Port Elizabeth, 15 March 2012. 21 Rassool and Prosalendis, Recalling Community in Cape Town. 22 Richard Rive, ‘District Six: Fact and Fiction’, in The Struggle for District Six: Past and Present, ed. Shamil Jeppie and Crain Soudien (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990), 110. 23 Rive, 111. 24 Parnell, ‘Creating Racial Privilege’. 25 Shamil Jeppie and Crain Soudien, ‘An Introduction: Hands Off District Six!’, in Jeppie and Soudien, Struggle for District Six, 12–16. 26 Beyers notes that the District Six land claims process was ‘mired in social and ideological differences among claimants, competing visions about its redevelopment, and acrimonious stakeholder politics since the outset’, while PELCRA was unique for its early displays of strong

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solidarity and consensus (although this also began to unravel later in the process). See Beyers, ‘Land Restitution in Port Elizabeth’, 827. Anwah Nagia and Colin Miller have provided a detailed overview of the links between the District Six Museum, the work of the District Six Beneficiary Trust and the politics of land restitution in the Western Cape: see Anwah Nagia and Colin Miller, ‘Land Restitution in District Six: Settling a Traumatic Landscape’, in Rassool and Prosalendis, Recalling Community in Cape Town, 166–78. 27 Crain Soudien, ‘The First Few Years of the District Six Museum Foundation’, in Rassool and Prosalendis, Recalling Community in Cape Town, 5–6. 28 Bonita Bennett, ‘Encounters in the District Six Museum’, Curator: The Museum Journal 55, no. 3 (2012): 319–25. 29 Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’. 30 Meltzer, ‘Past Streets’, 22. 31 Joanna Sassoon, ‘Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital Reproduction’, in Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (London: Routledge, 2004), 186–202. 32 Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, ‘Introduction: Photographs as Objects’, in Edwards and Hart, Photographs Objects Histories, 1–15. 33 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 5. 34 Edwards and Hart, ‘Introduction: Photographs as Objects’. 35 Hirsch, Family Frames, 9. 36 Coombes, History after Apartheid, 126. 37 Hirsch, Family Frames. 38 Hirsch, 242–43. 39 Hirsch, 252–53. 40 Noel Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (Cape Town: Jonathan Cape, 1992). 41 Penny Sparke, Brenda Martin, and Trevor Keeble, eds, The Modern Period Room (New York: Routledge, 2006). 42 Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Verso, 2002), 2. 43 Daniel Mathews, quoted in Anne Schuster, ed., Piecing Together the Past: Writings from a Workshop on Memory and Narrative Held at the District Six Museum during August and September 2000 (Cape Town: District Six Museum Foundation, 2000), 45. 44 Sidney Prince, interview and walking tour with Naomi Roux, 28 March 2012.

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45 Sidney Prince, interview and walking tour with Naomi Roux, 28 March 2012. 46 Sidney Prince, interview and walking tour with Naomi Roux, 28 March 2012. 47 Gregory George, interviewed by Naomi Roux, South End, 9 May 2013. 48 Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). 49 Sheila Wilson, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Korsten, 14 May 2013. 50 Michael Barry, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Port Elizabeth, 13 March 2013. 51 NAHHP, ‘Wie Is Jy? Wie Is Ons? The 1990 Northern Areas Uprising in Context’, booklet accompanying exhibition (Port Elizabeth: NAHHP/ SADRAT, 2011).

4

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Public art and place-making

44 Strand Street In the centre of Port Elizabeth, an easily overlooked piece of graffiti is stencilled on to one of the concrete pillars supporting the M4 highway. This intersection is the major point of entry into the city if one is arriving by car off the N2, the main artery that connects Port Elizabeth to Cape Town and, in the other direction, to Durban. It is located right alongside the sea, with the highway itself splitting off the city from the shore. Despite this prime location it is gloomy and somewhat run-down: the tall buildings and raised highways have turned it into a ferocious wind tunnel, litter and dust eddying in the doorways of semi-occupied buildings and nondescript 1950s office blocks. The M4 highway – ‘Settler’s Way’ – is partially raised above Strand Street below, and runs right past the thirdand fourth-floor windows of the office blocks and cheap student ­accommodation that face towards the sea. This artwork, in monochrome black and white, depicts Stephen Bantu Biko, the Black Consciousness leader and student activist who died in the custody of the apartheid security police in Pretoria Central Prison in 1977 (figure 26). Biko stands with folded arms, facing away from the harbour opposite to look towards the entrance of the empty six-storey office building at 44 Strand Street. An intrepid visitor might lean against the chained-together security gates to peer across the abandoned lobby, littered with leaves and broken glass, to spot the obsolete tenants board behind the security desk, headed with bright yellow letters: ‘BIKO HOUSE’. The anonymous graffiti and the BIKO HOUSE title are the only tangible markers of the hidden history of this building. In the

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Figure 26  Biko graffiti on Strand Street.

1970s and early 1980s, this block – formerly known as the Sanlam Building – was the headquarters of the Eastern Cape branch of the South African security police (figure 27). Many activists were held in the building during this period: many of those detained here did not come out alive. Police invariably evaded responsibility for these deaths, although partial details of some came to light during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s. In 1969, led by Biko, Barney Pityana and others, the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) split from the leftist National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). Biko resoundingly rejected the multiracial approach of NUSAS as well as the Charterist resistance organisations such as the ANC, arguing that for revolutionary activism to be possible, black activists could not escape the reality that ‘black man, you are on your own’.1 SASO has been described by Mzamane and others as the ‘harbinger of a new revolutionary spirit’, influencing the formation of several new organisations, inspired by Black Consciousness, in secondary schools in the early 1970s.2 These included the South African Students’ Movement (SASM) and the South African Youth Organisation.3 This was the generation of newly politicised youth, in the wake of the ‘quiet decade’ of the 1960s, who would be at the forefront of the

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Figure 27  View up Strand Street: Biko House/Sanlam Building is on the corner to the left.

1976 Soweto uprisings – a series of protests that, effectively, never quite died down until the unbanning of resistance movements and the release of political prisoners in 1990. The 1976 student uprisings had at their root school students’ rejection of a segregated and inadequate education system, and were catalysed by the introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in township schools. Beginning in Soweto in June 1976, the wave of protest soon reached other urban centres, breaking out in Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage by mid-July. In Port Elizabeth, young protesters targeted bottle stores, police vehicles and schools, and police responded violently: by 8 August, ten  people had been killed and over twenty injured.4 Between

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April  and November 1977, nineteen political prisoners, including Biko, had died in police custody, and all organisations affiliated to Black Consciousness were banned in October that year. The Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO) was formed in 1978 as an underground organisation to carry forward the BCM’s ideals, but it never really recovered as a political force. However, many of the writings and ideals of Black Consciousness emerged in the work of a new generation of young student activists in the protests of 2015. On 18 August 1977, Biko and his compatriot Peter Jones were arrested by the security police on their way back to Port Elizabeth from a meeting in Cape Town. Following the countrywide explosion of seemingly uncontainable youth-driven resistance in the wake of the 1976 student uprisings, Biko had been banned to the King William’s Town district some 250 kilometres away. The two men were held overnight in Grahamstown, and then transferred to the Walmer police station in Port Elizabeth. This was the last time they would see each other. Peter Jones was held in detention for 533 days and released in 1979. Biko spent 20 days in isolation at the Walmer station, after which the police brought him to the Sanlam Building on Strand Street on 6 September. It was here that, under interrogation, he sustained the brutal head injuries that would lead to his death soon thereafter. He was moved back to the police station, where a warder found him unconscious and foaming at the mouth on the evening of 11 September. Security forces bundled him into the back of a Land Rover and drove overnight to the Pretoria Central Prison hospital, where he died of a brain haemorrhage on the night of 12 September.5 Twenty years later at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, the police present at his interrogation maintained that his injuries were unintentional: there had been a ‘scuffle’, they said, at which Biko had accidentally hit his head on a wall. All five men – Harold Snyman, Daniel Siebert, Johan Beneke, Gideon Niewoudt and Rubin Marx – were denied amnesty for Biko’s murder by the TRC. Although possibly the best-known Sanlam Building detainee, Biko was just one of many people who were detained and violently assaulted there. Others include George Botha, a high-school teacher and activist detained in December 1976. He fell six floors down the stairwell, dying of head injuries: police maintained that he had jumped over the railings. Botha had been active in student

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politics in the 1960s while studying at the University of the Western Cape, and his arrest followed his vocal support of student activists at Paterson High School where he was teaching at the time. In July 1978, nineteen-year-old Lungile Tabalaza died on the same day of his arrest after falling from the window of the sixth-floor interrogation room.6 He had been arrested on suspicion of arson and robbery. Others, such as Pan Africanist Congress activist Moki Cekisani, survived their detention in the building but suffered lasting effects of the torture that took place there. Yet, despite the profound symbolic space occupied by the building in the city’s history – not that far out of living memory – these histories are not publicly marked in any way, other than by the graffiti intervention on the pillar. The chained doors are flanked on either side by shops selling curtains, cloth, mobile phones, and household odds and ends. The interior, when I visited the building for the first time in 2013, was in bad repair: loose tiles, broken glass and other debris crunches underfoot, while the broken staircase bannister is in the process of coming away from the wall altogether. Abandoned furniture, old mattresses and broken cupboards are piled up in the empty rooms, blocking what little light filters through the dusty windows (figure 28).

Figure 28  View towards the street from 44 Strand’s front door.

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Is Biko’s ephemeral image looking into the entry of this building accusingly? Or is he inviting us to follow his gaze, to enter this hollow space of traumatic memory, to experience its ghosts and its accretions of meaning? Biko’s image appears in other ephemeral spots, painted and pasted on walls, throughout the city: graffiti, a painted mural in the holding cell at the Walmer police station, ­monochrome posters pasted on to walls by a young playwright, a student cultural society that positions itself within the cultural politics of Black Consciousness. In some respects this reevocation of Biko’s presence in the early to mid-2010s prefigured the eruption of student protest under the Fees Must Fall banner, which drew powerfully on the images and philosophies of Black Consciousness to call into question a number of prevailing ‘postapartheid’ status quos: chief among them, the empty promises of the ‘rainbow nation’ in the 1990s.

Rebranding the city: Nelson Mandela and Route 67 The metropolitan area that includes Port Elizabeth and the nearby towns of Uitenhage and Despatch is named for another well-known struggle hero and the former president of South Africa: Nelson Mandela. The Mandela name is a deeply mythologised one, entangled with the ideas of reconciliation, democratic citizenship and the ‘rainbow nation’ that so strongly characterised South African public culture (and cultures of memory) in the transition of the 1990s. These ideas of the ‘new’ nation were, as Verne Harris has argued, Always a construct, a vision, embraced first in public discourses in South Africa and then quickly adopted globally as shorthand for the ambitious project of democratisation … Public discourse in and about South Africa was emblazoned by the concepts of noble struggle against apartheid, of post-apartheid reconciliation, and of nationbuilding. Central to this energy was the life and work of Nelson Mandela, the living symbol of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s ‘rainbow nation’.7

Although Mandela did not spend significant amounts of time in Port Elizabeth, it was one of the first cities that he visited after his

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Public art and place-making 137

release from prison in Cape Town in 1990. With the national and global cachet associated with the Nelson Mandela name, the figure of Mandela has been an important marketing and rebranding tool for the city. This rebranding is, in many instances, intertwined with projects of place-making and redesigning public spaces, many of these led by the MBDA. The MBDA is one of two South African city-owned development agencies (the other is the Johannesburg Development Agency). Its broad mandate is to drive urban regeneration projects backed by the metropolitan council, with the ultimate goal of encouraging public and private investment in the city’s economy and in future development – a process characterised by former MBDA CEO Pierre Voges as ‘dynamic place-making’.8 Among the MBDA’s projects to date are street furniture and urban design interventions in the city centre, the restoration of the nineteenth-century Athenaeum Theatre, renewed facilities at King’s Beach, an upgrading project in New Brighton’s Singaphi Street (which leads to the Red Location Museum), the restoration of the historic Tramways Building for use as the MBDA offices, and a public art project centred on the Donkin Reserve in the city centre. The Donkin Reserve development has been one of the MBDA’s most iconic projects, and is one strongly centred on the image of Mandela as the city’s namesake. It forms the core of an urban public art route called ‘Route 67’, a reference to Mandela’s years of public service between 1942 when he first became actively involved in ANC activism and 2009 when he retired from public life. (The ‘67’ figure is also used in the nationally marketed ‘67 Minutes of Service’ volunteer campaign, held annually to commemorate Mandela’s birthday on 18 July). Mandela’s name has been attached to a number of public institutions in the city, following the metropolitan region’s renaming in 2001. The King George VI Art Gallery has become the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum; while the University of Port Elizabeth, Vista University and the Port Elizabeth Technikon have merged to become a new tertiary institution, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. The local football stadium, built for the 2010 FIFA football World Cup, is named Nelson Mandela Stadium and since 2017 has boasted a life-size bronze statue of Mandela in  its grounds. A plan has also been floated in various iterations

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since 2001 by the city council and the MBDA for a monumental representation of Mandela in or near the city’s harbour. Various proposals were made between 2001 and 2005 for a sixty-five-metre statue of Mandela in the harbour, akin to New York’s Statue of Liberty. The plan was revived in 2013 when plans were tabled for a drastic redevelopment and remaking of the harbour, and the MBDA was mandated to fundraise for this project in 2015. In late 2018, a city-led design competition for a new Mandela monument was awarded to a design for a twenty-seven-storey glass tower, ‘The Tower Of Light’, proposed by a consortium of designers with backing from former activist turned businessperson Khusta Jack. The tower includes one floor for each year of Mandela’s imprisonment, conceptualised as a journey that leads visitors to an airy glass atrium at the top of the tower to represent light and freedom. This notion of a monumental or artistic representation of Mandela’s ‘Long Walk to Freedom’, a phrase made ubiquitous by his 1994 autobiography,9 was used in a public art project that has become to some degree iconic of the city. The Donkin Reserve is a green public space on a rise above the city centre, first proclaimed as a public space by Port Elizabeth’s first governor Sir Rufane Donkin in 1820. For nearly two hundred years, the most prominent structure in the Donkin Reserve was a stone pyramid that Donkin had commissioned as a memorial to his wife Elizabeth, who had died in India in 1818. In Elizabeth’s memory, the governor had ‘gifted’ this land to ‘the people of Port Elizabeth’ in perpetuity – although who ‘the people’ referred to precisely is not clear. Certainly in the context of apartheid, and under colonial segregationist practices and laws which removed people of colour from the centre of South African cities, the notion of ‘public space’ and ‘the people’ is a loaded one. When the MBDA was tasked with redesigning the Donkin Memorial in a post-apartheid, twenty-first-century context, it was seen as an opportunity to rehabilitate an exclusionary urban landscape. The Route 67 art project would form an important driver of this postcolonial rehabilitation. Its centrepiece is a work titled Voting Line (Anthony Harris and Konrad Geel, 2010/2011). Voting Line (figure 29) is at the summit of the Donkin Reserve hill, which is traversed by a winding brick pathway from bottom to top, intended to represent the long voting queues of 1994’s first

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Figure 29  Voting Line detail. Anthony Harris and Konrad Geel (2010/2011), laser-cut steel installation.

­emocratic national elections. The pathways, painted with ‘X’ d shapes of the type used to mark ballot sheets, lead to a set of lasercut steel figures representing the silhouettes of queueing voters, curving at the top of the pathway around the base of a flagpole. The final figure, towards which the line of human figures leads the viewer, is a cut-out of Nelson Mandela, one fist raised to the sky in triumphant salute. The flagpole, bearing the new post-1994 South African flag, is connected to Donkin’s pyramid and the neighbouring nineteenth-century lighthouse (now housing a coffee shop and tourist information centre) by a mosaic walkway (figure 30). This is the culmination of the Route 67 public art walk, which invites viewers to engage with artworks installed throughout the city centre before climbing the hill – an embodied experience of Mandela’s ‘Long Walk’ – towards these emblems of renewed nationhood and post-apartheid collective identities. The Route was launched with six core artworks on the hill, and over time has been expanded to include work made by student collectives, public art in other sites of historic importance in the city, a number of works in  progress, murals, exhibition centres such as the Athenaeum Theatre building, and the Keiskamma Guernica tapestry in the

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Figure 30  View from the flagpole towards the nineteenth-century pyramid and lighthouse, with new mosaic walkway.

Red Location Museum exhibition – at the time of writing, the only work on the route outside the boundaries of the colonial city centre. Visitors can sign up for paid walking tours of the route through the city’s online tourism portal, and the symbol of Mandela’s figure alongside the pyramid has been used in several marketing publications and brochures. Rufane Donkin’s original ‘gift’ of land to the city cannot be read without an awareness of the city’s nineteenth-century histories of

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displacement and apartheid-era exclusions from urban space. When the MBDA began to look into reimagining the Donkin Reserve, its history as a non-public ‘public’ space needed to be in some way addressed. The urban design strategy and the public art installations were seen as a way to remake a site of exclusion into a site of belonging and participation, gathering at Mandela’s feet as a symbol of new identities and democratic belonging. This desire is explicitly stated in much of the planning documentation around the renewal of the Reserve, including a conceptual framework drawn up by arts practitioners and activists Peggy Calata and Peter Stark in 2009, who make efforts to link the timeline of Mandela’s biography with a national biography of reconciliation, and to intertwine the lives of the city’s two namesakes: In 1918, at a small rural settlement at Mvezo … Rolihlala Mandela was born. 100 years earlier, Elizabeth Donkin died in India at Meerut. On arrival at Algoa Bay to superintend the arrival of the British Settlers in 1820, [Rufane Donkin] names the settlement after his wife and allocated land around his monument to her ‘in perpetuity’ as public open space. In 1918, the leaders of the white community of the City – unaware of the importance to their future of the birth at Mvezo – were planning on another m ­ onument – the Campanile – to mark the centenary of the arrival of the British Settlers.10

In Calata and Stark’s framework, this timeline of centenaries and temporal coincidences would come full circle by 2018, when ‘the City Centre has to be re-settled by the mixed population of the new country, at ease with each other in a place they all feel they own and in which they all feel a collective pride.’ Like the extensive designled transformation that the Red Location Museum was expected to  foster, these are lofty ambitions for what was essentially an urban design project. The Campanile that Stark and Calata’s document refers to is a tower built alongside the harbour, constructed in 1920 to commemorate the centenary of the 1820 settlers’ landing. The monument contains a small history exhibition, and visitors can climb to the top for a panoramic view of the bay where the settlers first arrived. This is also the official starting point of the Route 67 walk. Facing the tower is a curved wall, displaying a set of images on a relief panel by artist Mpumzeni Ezra Mkhonto

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Figure 31  Wall of Texts. Mkhonto Gwazela and Lelethu PoeticSoul Mahambehlala (2011).

Gwazela. The panels, as described by Gwazela, represent ‘histories of creativity’ in the Eastern Cape and South Africa, encompassing a narrative from precolonial times to the present. It is accompanied, below the images, by a poem by performance poet Lelethu PoeticSoul Mahambehlala, the Wall of Texts. Through proximity, the Campanile Frieze and Wall of Texts (figure 31) – a combined work by two young black artists based in Port Elizabeth – speaks directly back to the colonial symbolism of the Campanile tower. Dorelle Sapere, the MBDA’s planning and development manager, was at the helm of the Route 67 project from its inception, and she uses the term ‘recolonising’ to describe the role that the Route 67 artworks were meant to play: ‘transforming the inner city to be owned by everyone, and recolonising it to have access by those who didn’t have it in the past’. This project of reoccupation or reframing was also intended to deliver a tourism product that is amenable to marketing and branding strategies.11 In the first phase of the Route 67 project, six relatively established artists were invited to produce works to be placed on the Donkin Reserve itself. These include the Voting Line installation, as well as works like Dolla Sapeta’s Fish Bird – a mythical hybrid animal

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Public art and place-making 143

figure – and Duncan Stewart’s River Memory, a sculpture which follows the path of a stream that has long since been reclaimed by urban construction. The second phase includes a number of works, like Gwazela’s, located elsewhere in the city. While some are more abstract or conceptual, some of these pieces speak directly to urban history: 76 Youth, for example, is a work by a collective led by artist Michael Barry, a series of metal sheets designed to look like sheets of newspaper caught by the wind, running alongside St Mary’s Steps with images and text related to the 1976 uprisings. The art walk route is marked by metal ‘wayfinders’, sixty-seven flag-like constructions each inscribed with a date between 1942 and 2008 and a quotation from Mandela’s writing and speeches. The first of these is marked ‘1942’ and placed next to the Wall of Texts, while the final one – 2008 – is located outside the Athenaeum Theatre and declares, ‘It is time for new hands to lift the burdens. It is in your hands now.’

Conversations with the Queen One of the Route 67 works, Conversations with the Queen, was intended to place twentieth-century activist figures – Steve Biko, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Robert Sobukwe and others – alongside a 1902 statue of Queen Victoria on Vuyisile Mini Square, outside the city’s main library (figure 32). The installation of the figures was delayed by a planned reconstruction of the square, but the original intention was to recast a smaller version of the looming queen, and place the other figures around her as though they were in collective conversation. This installation was seen as a way to reimagine and recast meanings of Queen Victoria as a loaded symbol of colonial power, and the continuing effects of colonial histories and spatial inscriptions on the city. This is indicative of one of the intentions behind the Route 67 project in general – to ‘speak back’ to these markings of colonial presence, which are overwhelmingly apparent in the city centre’s architecture, morphology and street names. This reinscription, or speaking back, has been strongly formulated around the image of Mandela and his biography, including the ‘Long Walk’ metaphor that the visitor is meant to experience as a temporal and physical journey through the city.

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Figure 32  Queen Victoria. John Roscoe Williams (1902), located in Vuyisile Mini Square outside the main public library.

Mandela’s name and image are, of course, eminently marketable as a tourism strategy. But as a strategy for fostering belonging, senses of citizenship and the promises of reconciliation, the underlying premise of Route 67’s symbolism has been powerfully called into question by the Rhodes Must Fall/Fees Must Fall student movement. The Rhodes Must Fall movement, on which the Fees Must Fall movement was built, grew out of a growing anger and sense of exclusion experienced by black students at the University of Cape

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Town – although this groundswell, as later events indicated, was certainly not limited to that university. On 9 March 2015, student Chumani Maxwele led a protest around the presence of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes in a prominent place on the campus. As part of this protest, Maxwele threw a bucket of human faeces over the statue – an echo of the ‘dirty protest’ strategies that had emerged at Red Location ten years previously. The statue, for many students, represented continued colonial structures and power imbalances that played out in their daily lives at the university. Ultimately, the statue was removed a month later, at a crowded event on 9 April. As a crane dramatically lifted the statue off its plinth, artist Sethembile Msezane raised her arms, in a costume with enormous sculptural feathered wings – an image that circulated globally and  has become iconic of the moment of removal of Rhodes’ statue. Msezane has noted that the performance was intended to call to mind the iconic stone eagle from Great Zimbabwe, which is still kept in Rhodes’ former home at Groote Schuur mansion – part of the estate that the university now stands on. She recalls that after  standing in place for four hours, periodically raising her winged arms: ‘My feet were blue, I was sunburnt; I had heat stroke  and blurry vision from looking directly into the sun  … I felt like we were beginning to question this idealistic “rainbow nation”.’12 Students’ anger was not directly about the presence of colonial statues, but rather about the lack of genuine societal change that they saw around them, as the supposed ‘born free’ post-1994 generation. The presence of statues like that of Rhodes served, for many, as painful reminders of unkept promises of their parents’ and older siblings’ generation, and the sense that justice for past wrongs had been overlooked in favour of a form of ‘reconciliation’ that did not allow space for anger or for the refusal of forgiveness. Students who had grown up in the democratic era did not carry the baggage of nostalgia that those who had experienced the transition did: and they were (and are) all too keenly aware that deeply entrenched inequalities and patterns of marginalisation are continually reproduced in the present, notwithstanding the reconciliatory rhetoric often emblematised by Mandela-as-symbol. On the back of Rhodes Must Fall, student movements across the country shifted to a demand that Fees Must Fall – that barriers to tertiary education

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needed to be lifted, access needed to be eased, and that students’ experiences of exclusion, racism and daily struggle had to be taken seriously. This was a moment of serious rupture in the tertiary sector, and one which South African universities have only slowly begun to address in the subsequent years. The struggle around the public symbolism of Rhodes as a colonial monument quickly spread to other cities, led by students across the country. (And further afield, as evidenced by a similar call to remove a bust of Rhodes from Oriel College at the University of Oxford. At the same time, calls began to emerge for the removal of statues and monuments celebrating Confederate war heroes in the United States.) In Port Elizabeth, three days before the removal of the Rhodes statue to an undisclosed place of safety – where it remains today – the 1905 Horse Memorial statue in Port Elizabeth was defaced. The Horse Memorial was intended to commemorate the lives of the thousands of British horses killed in the South African War, and depicted a soldier kneeling down to offer his horse a bucket of water. The figure of the soldier was removed from its base and pushed over. A few days later, Queen Victoria’s figure outside the public library was covered overnight with green paint.13 This was not, however, the first time that the Queen Victoria sculpture outside the library had come under (figurative) fire. The figure of the queen has acted as a locus for protests around coloniality and its reproductions for decades. As Ndletyana and Webb have pointed out, South Africa has never had a particularly clear or uniform policy response to either the presence of (or ad hoc interventions in) colonial/apartheid statuary and monuments, beyond the general protections of declared ‘heritage resources’ offered in the National Heritage Resources Act. In addition, because South Africa’s transition was so carefully built around the idea of ‘reconciliation’, which included assuaging the anxieties of white minorities, apartheid monuments were for the most part left intact. Exceptions included the 1994 removal of statues of Hendrik Verwoerd, the ‘architect of apartheid’, from outside the Parliament buildings in Cape Town as well as from the Free State legislature in 1994. Although the removal of the Rhodes statue from the University of Cape Town campus was a highly spectacular, socialmedia-friendly performative moment, and one that encapsulated much larger points of contestation and anger, many statues and

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monuments had been sites of ad hoc intervention for a long time, including older colonial and apartheid statuary as well as new post1994 monuments.14 Queen Victoria became a site not only for popular protest but also for political points-scoring within various factions in the ANC in the early 2000s. In the leadup to the 2004 national elections, regional ANC chairperson Mike Xego publicly called for the statue to be removed. Xego’s statements caused something of an outcry among heritage groups and individuals, as well as earning a rebuke from Vuyo Toto, ANC regional secretary. Writer and political commentator Xolela Mangcu, who was then the chairperson of the Steve Biko Foundation, came out in support of Xego: ‘What reconciliation is it that demands a people to deny their own history, and instead glorify murderers … What kind of people glorify their conquerors?’15 Mangcu saw the removal of colonial statuary as a requirement for building a truly ‘African’ public history: what was at stake was no less than a ‘war of memory’. In 2010, as Port Elizabeth joined several other South African cities in preparations for the 2010 FIFA football World Cup amid feverish promises of increased tourism and related revenue, Victoria’s eyes were covered with black spray paint and graffiti appeared on the statue’s base: ‘Goduka Victoria’ (Go home, Victoria) and ‘Hamba’ (Go away). The covering of the queen with green paint in April 2015, on the night of Rhodes’ removal in Cape Town, was therefore part of a longer history of contesting, intervening in, and ‘vandalising’ the statue. Some interventions have been more ephemeral: in 2013 a young local artist, Bantu Mtshiselwa, posted a photograph on social media that he had taken at Vuyisile Mini Square, depicting an elderly Xhosa woman regally draped in a leopard-print blanket, standing in front of the queen’s statue and addressing her.

Monumental resistance It is not only older monuments and statues that have undergone this kind of material resistance, however. Port Elizabeth and the Eastern Cape hinterland are dotted with semi-abandoned, vandalised memorials, as well as with memorials that have been fenced off from the publics they are meant to represent. A short walk

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from the Red Location Museum in New Brighton is the Emlotheni Memorial (sometimes called ‘Heroes’ Acre’, evoking an older and more conservative nationalist memorial form), a monument to six Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) soldiers who were executed by the apartheid regime in the 1960s. Unveiled in 1998, the monument includes the six graves where the soldiers were reburied: Vuyisile Mini, Zinakile Mkaba, Wilson Kayingo, Nolali Mpentse, Daniel Ndongeni and Samuel Jonas.16 The site carries historical significance as a public space and a space of resistance, having previously been used for meetings and political rallies. The memorial is adorned with the ANC logo and a stylised image of warriors carrying spears and shields, with an inscription in English and Xhosa paying tribute to ‘the heroism, selflessness, courage and patriotism displayed by the gallant fighters who are buried here, as the first detachment of the glorious people’s army’. Across the road from Emlotheni is the burnt-out shell of the Mendi bottle store, burnt down during the 1976 student uprisings, with longstanding plans in place to turn the old bottle store into a creative arts centre. These two sites also stand near the plinth for a damaged memorial to the SS Mendi, a British warship on which 646 people – including 607 members of the South African ‘Native Labour’ contingent, and 30 British crew members – were killed in a collision in the English Channel in 1917. The majority of the black troops on board came from the rural Eastern Cape. In 1999, the city’s Recreational and Cultural Services division took the decision to fence off the Emlotheni site, barely a year after its construction, following a spate of vandalism at the site. Today, it is enclosed by a palisade fence and a locked gate, rendering it inaccessible to the surrounding public (figure 33). The semicircular shape of the memorial’s structure traps litter, weeds grow between the paving stones, and the site appears neglected and unkempt. Similarly, the memorial to the activists known as the Cradock Four in Motherwell, to the north of Port Elizabeth, is seldom visited and difficult to access. Opened in May 2011, the memorial commemorates the lives of Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkhonto, Fort Calata and Sicelo Mhlauli. The site is diagonally opposite the land where their burnt-out car was found after their execution by security forces in June 1985. Like Emlotheni, the Cradock Four Memorial is fenced off and locked, and as a result is rendered

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Figure 33  Emlotheni Heroes’ Acre, viewed through the locked fencing.

Figure 34  Security guard at Coega Vulindlela Village unlocking the memorial to the Cradock Four near Motherwell.

inaccessible to those without access to the structures of municipal power (figure 34). While the memorial is owned by the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality, keys are held at the Coega Vulindlela Village offices on the adjacent property, which further complicates

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access. If one has the insistence and the cultural capital to talk one’s way in, access still requires giving one’s identity number and fingerprints to the security office at the Coega gates. In one instance, visiting the memorial with three former activists who had personally known the Cradock Four and had been present at their funeral, the security guard accompanied us inside after we had managed to negotiate access. While walking around taking photographs, he told us that he had never been through the gate to which he held the key; he asked me to take a photograph of him next to one of the black granite columns and to text it to his sister for him. There are many other similar examples from in and around Nelson Mandela Bay. The memorial to the 1985 Langa Massacre in Uitenhage, opened in 2011, has been repeatedly vandalised. Another memorial to the Cradock Four on a hilltop in the small town of Cradock, where the activists lived, has been left in a state of abandonment, with an empty visitors’ centre displaying broken windows and smashed light fittings. In Bisho, the provincial capital of the Eastern Cape near the city of East London, a monument to the 1992 Bisho Massacre in what was then the Ciskei is locked up behind a palisade fence. A guide from the nearby Steve Biko Centre in Ginsburg, on a visit to sites of memory in and around Biko’s home town, explained that the memorial is usually opened only on the anniversary of the massacre for official commemorative events. The rest of the time it is inaccessible, including by those who may have lost family or community members in the Bisho killings. In conversation with city officials responsible for the ‘delivery’ of these memorials, the blame for ‘vandalism’ of these new memorials and the subsequent need for their closure in the interests of ‘preservation’ is usually attributed to a ‘lack of education’ of local residents about the value of these monuments and the histories they represent. Any such conclusions are necessarily speculative in the absence of a focused study of what has happened to these kinds of memorials and why. However, the idea that these sites could be protected by ‘educating’ residents about what they mean seems somewhat spurious. The majority of post-1994 monuments in the region commemorate events that happened in the 1980s and early 1990s, well within living memory, and certainly still part of the texture of collective memory in the places where they are located. Is it ‘education’ that is missing, or is it a sense of ownership? This is



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unclear – but what is clear is that these gated memorials are not, in any sense, effective as places of memory. Perhaps the ways in which they have been contested, ignored or actively rejected carries a far stronger message.

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Public art and urban upgrades in New Brighton While the majority of public art and MBDA ‘urban upgrading’ projects have been located in the city centre – also the core of the city’s colonial, Victorian-era architectural character, and of its tourism marketing – the MBDA has implemented one recent public art and environmental upgrade project in New Brighton township. In 2012, at the behest of the city, the MBDA issued a request for proposals towards a planned redesign and public art installation along Singaphi Street, a major road running through New Brighton alongside Red Location, leading to the Red Location Cultural Precinct. The circumstances in which this project was announced were rather different to the current situation, most notably in that the Red Location Museum was still open and operational and the wheels were slowly turning to staff and open the new library and art gallery. When the museum was closed down in late 2013, there was no indication that this would be as indefinite as it has been, and so the urban design research and implementation process went ahead in 2014, finally completed in early 2019. Local architecture and heritage company The Workplace Architects was appointed to lead the design and research process, in collaboration with a youth arts and culture agency called Numb City Productions and a public engagement partner, Ubumubesizwe Trading. In a 2014 preliminary heritage report, which aimed to identify heritage resources in and around the street, the heritage practitioners are careful to note that although the research and reporting requirements of the National Heritage Resources Act really require only an assessment of tangible or built heritage places or objects, a great deal of the important heritage of Singaphi Street is intangible. While spaces like a row of apartheid-era single-men’s hostels, the homes of notable residents, or social spaces such as sports fields and churches are very important, the texture and the embedded meanings in the street are dependent on its everyday uses

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and the everyday practices of residents, as the makers and authors of urban space and its day-to-day meanings. Architect Bryan Wintermeyer’s report, as the responsible heritage practitioner, was insistent that the ‘localised genius loci’ of the street not only had to be respected in any urban design and public art interventions, but needed to inform their implementation: [The precinct’s] sense of character … is, in this case, defined by a historical street as part of a historical suburb that, through the development of modest structures alongside it, and its continuous use as a place of community importance becomes significant. This community use is largely the ordinary and everyday and this character (and so ‘identity’) is largely defined by the localised.17

Although also a city-led project, the emphasis on ‘small’ heritages, on the personal and on micro-narratives is quite different to the monumental architectural approach of the Red Location Museum up the road. The museum serves as a showcase of political power and legacy, and was an opportunity to write an Eastern Cape ‘voice’ into a national narrative of struggle. The intention to redevelop the street was undoubtedly catalysed by the Red Location arts precinct development, inviting comparisons to Soweto’s Vilakazi Street in Johannesburg. Without the expectation of tourism-led development and related private investment, Singaphi Street would in all likelihood not have been subject to the same treatment. Indeed, it is only one of many important thoroughfares and sites of local history and memory in the Port Elizabeth townships, any of which could equally have been sites for such development – except that they are not inscribed into a potential tourist or city-sanctioned arts-andculture route in the way that Singaphi has been through the presence of the Red Location Museum. The urban design project included a number of interventions: play parks for children, a bicycle park, street furniture, paving, and formalised spaces for existing street activities such as trading, playing, walking and cooking. My interest here, though, is specifically in the public art component of the work, as an extension of the MBDA’s public art and heritage interventions in the city centre. Given the fraught relationships, fragmented politics and sometimes violent retaliation engendered by the Red Location Cultural Precinct development, the public art installation required a careful

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participatory framework and a strong sense of direct ownership from residents. It is too early to know if the interventions will be better accepted than the museum, or than many of the empty and locked memorial spaces around the city and the province: but the low-key nature of the public artworks and their use value seems, thus far, to have worked in their favour. At the beginning of the urban upgrade process, The Workplace consortium ran workshops with ‘community veterans’ – elderly people who had lived in New Brighton for a long time – to identify significant places, people and stories in the precinct. These were to serve as the basis for the assessment of heritage significance in the precinct, and later to anchor the public art component. The public art intervention took the form of a set of concrete benches and bollards, with mosaic patterns and images, serving both as street furniture and as artwork based on the narratives emerging from a series of oral history and art-making workshops. The imagery for the installations was developed with a group of youths and a group of elderly people – or ‘veterans’ – of the neighbourhood, who worked with Numb City Productions and public art collective The Trinity Sessions to create visual representations of some of the stories and characteristics of the area. The elderly participants were trained in oral history methodology and invited to interview one another to write a collection of stories, memories and biographies of the neighbourhood. The group of youths, meanwhile, was trained in mosaic techniques, and then translated and applied the collectively developed imagery into mosaic artworks on the new street furniture, assisted by two professional artists  – Mkhonto Gwazela and Owen Tarr. Other than the benches, participants’ narratives were collated in a sixty-page book, which included images of the mosaics and their meanings as well as the oral histories and stories that had come out of the workshopping process. The book serves a means to record and disseminate the narratives that informed the process, of which the mosaic benches are only a partial reflection.18 The benches are by no means a grandiose or ground-breaking public art product: they are low-key, pragmatic and decorative, part urban design strategy and part creative art intervention based on the everyday. This is in contrast to both the Red Location Museum as an architectural object and to the six artworks on the Donkin

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Memorial as monumental forms of public art (although these were also an MBDA-led project). The participatory process was not without its difficulties: trust-building in a space where the Red Location Museum development had left many with a bitter taste in their mouths was a major difficulty, and getting the groups of elders and youths to work together productively was another. While the road upgrade might be welcomed by those who live on and use this space, the most compelling output of the public art component is not, in my view, the benches themselves. Rather, it is the careful participatory methodology that produced them, and the poignant collection of stories and places of local importance that were identified through this methodology. There is a glimpse here, perhaps, of the potential role that public art could play in a rapidly transforming, deeply unequal city – not as a tourist attraction and not as a beautifying project, but as a beginning point for evoking and recognising the ephemeral qualities that give the built environment its meaning. The  value of these mosaics as artworks, I would argue, is held less in the end product (which is relatively conservative as public art installations go) and more in the process by which they were made, including the difficulties and the limitations of that process.

The role of public art in urban transformation What ‘job’, then, is public art meant to do – in general, and in the specific case of Port Elizabeth? The bulk of the ‘official’ public art in Port Elizabeth, other than colonial-era monumental statuary, has been commissioned and managed by the MBDA. It fits very clearly into a vision for remaking a city by design, using tangible heritage resources, urban design and the creative arts as drivers to attract new types of cultural and material capital into neglected parts of the city. The MBDA’s various interventions over the years have had a pronounced material effect on the city, on its iconic heritage buildings as well as its public spaces. In these instances, public art and urban design have been given the role, as Pierre Voges has put it, of ‘dynamic place-making’ – a euphemism for drawing investment into public space and producing economic transformation for the city as a whole. Then there are the ‘softer’ elements of this form of remaking – a form of speaking back into colonial spaces, f­ostering

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new spaces of belonging and a sense of collective and inclusive ownership over the city. In this regard, as Zayd Minty has argued, public art becomes a potential form of ‘symbolic reparations’ of the kind called for in the TRC’s final report.19 In a historical context of exclusion, displacement and the traumas engendered by the worst excesses of the apartheid state, public art in the city has been tasked to take on the work of redress and recognition as well as contributing to a design-led transformational process. The idea of public art as a driver of urban regeneration or social cohesion is a longstanding one. Hall and Robertson have pointed out some of the problematics of ascribing this role to art, noting in particular that the frameworks for evaluating these kinds of goals do not meaningfully exist. This is in spite of ‘a widespread and uncritical acceptance, particularly among its main commissioners, that putting art in the public realm is inherently a good thing’.20 Public art – much like architecture, as the Red Location Museum case has demonstrated – is limited in its ability to meaningfully address social problems, in the absence of more holistic interventions. The idea of ‘social cohesion’ is ubiquitous in South African public discourse, often seen as a major role of the arts and culture sector. Although this is an apparently benign position, it is worth noting Rosalyn Deutsche’s framing of public art as part of a democratised public sphere.21 Deutsche reads the political value of public art not through its ability to foster consensus or a surface ideal of ‘cohesion’, but through its ability to stimulate difference: the real power of public art, in this view, is in its potential as a site of contestation, productive conflict and multiplicity. Images that are meant to ‘uplift’ and ‘unite’ – such as the figure of Mandela, raising a fist to the sky, under the cheerful umbrella of the South African flag – may be visually striking and aesthetically pleasing, and to some extent act as symbols of a city trying to at least on the surface cast off its heavy colonial shadows. But how much space do such symbols really leave for a refusal of the 1990s ideal of ‘reconciliation’? Is there space for anger, for ongoing trauma or for the refusal to forgive? These questions are related to those that South African students were asking in 2015 – what does it mean to live in a time of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘unity’ when, from their perspective, so little has genuinely changed?

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Biko House: Ephemeral memory This chapter opened with a description of Steve Biko House, the Sanlam Building, 44 Strand Street, as it appeared in 2012–2013 after years of neglect. The building, at this time, was owned by a private developer who had purchased it in the 1990s. It had for a short while been let as student accommodation. In the process, many of the traces of its history were erased. In 2002 the building was taken over by a controversial Irish property developer who owned several heritage buildings in central Port Elizabeth, many of them in poor states of repair. After the students departed, the building remained empty for over a decade, falling into the shabby state in which I found it on a visit with Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University professor Janet Cherry, in the early months of 2012. As a young activist in the 1980s, Cherry herself had been detained in this building. This site is both ordinary and extraordinary: from the outside, without knowing what happened here, it is run-down but unremarkable, more or less indistinguishable from the office blocks that surround it in the darkness of the highway overpass. It has no ‘official’ heritage protections: the law allows a set of general protections for buildings over sixty years old, which this building is not, and it allows for buildings to be nominated and declared as national, provincial or local heritage sites, a process which has not happened here. With almost nothing to mark it as such, it is a site of indescribable violence and trauma, but also an architectural void. Elsewhere in the city, ephemeral images of Biko have appeared in the same vein as the (surprisingly long-lived) graffiti piece on Strand Street described earlier. In the Walmer police station, a short drive away, is a rather strange mural painting of Biko’s face, covering a large portion of one of the walls of the holding cells (figure 35). People being temporarily held at the police station sit, huddled on the concrete floor, underneath this painting in remembrance of the cell’s more famous occupant. In late 2013, a series of posters bearing a stencilled copy of another iconic portrait of Biko appeared on city walls and phone boxes, advertising the play Dinner with Bantu by young Port Elizabeth playwright Xolisa Ngubelanga (figure 36). At around the same time, a group

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Figure 35  Biko mural in the Walmer police station, by Nathan Ryan Miller (2007).

Figure 36  Dinner with Bantu posters on an electricity box in Walmer township, designed by playwright Xolisa Ngubelanga.

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of students from the local university established a group called the Cultural Consciousness Society, which explicitly drew on Biko’s writings on culture as a political practice and engaged with Black Consciousness philosophies through spoken-word performance, poetry and visual arts – most regularly through a gathering at Njoli Square in Kwazakele.22 These interventions are, for the most part, ephemeral and often fleeting or performative, rather than tangible structures that occupy ‘official’ public space in the way that Mandela’s or Victoria’s statues do. Commemorative practices at the Sanlam Building have been similarly ephemeral, with little in the way of tangible markings of the building’s histories. 2002 was the twenty-five-year anniversary of Biko’s death, and a series of memorial interventions took place around this time across the city. These included a public lecture by Mosibudi Mangena, president of the political party AZAPO, and a cleansing ceremony held in the Walmer police cells.23 The mural in the Walmer cells was actually not a particularly ‘grassroots’ intervention, but was sponsored by a local tyre company as part of the company’s corporate social investment programme, along with some funding for a community centre near the police station.24 In 2006, as the thirtieth anniversary of Biko’s death approached, another cleansing ceremony was held at the Walmer station under the auspices of the provincial Department of Safety and Security, and was quite clearly a state-led event with various dignitaries and officials in attendance. At this event, a Methodist bishop, Ziphozihle Siwa, sprinkled holy water in the cell, incense was lit, and Siwa asked God to ‘cleanse this place and drive away our painful memories’ and to lift the ‘shame in this cell of darkness we are entering’.25 The example of Nyayo House in Nairobi, Kenya, offers some useful points of reflection on these processes of uncovering, opening up and symbolically ‘cleansing’ traumatic pasts. Nyayo House was constructed in downtown Nairobi during Daniel arap Moi’s presidency as government office space. Less commonly known was that it held secret torture cells in its basement, where dissidents and opponents of the Moi regime would be brought.26 In 2003 a ceremony was held to open and spiritually cleanse these spaces, led by a ministerial delegation under recently elected Mwai Kibaki. Descriptions of former detainees’ responses to the event are deeply



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moving, indicating the powerful current of repressed memory that revisiting this site evoked: Shem Ogola stood in the middle of the small crowd that had gathered to witness the opening of the basement of perhaps the most well-known building in Kenya. And in the glare of world television cameras, he broke down in a flood of tears. His body shook … Through Ogola, a torture survivor, Nyayo House torture chambers gained a human face … The occasion became a revelation into the past, a window through which Kenyans glimpsed into their country’s dark history.27

In the aftermath of the 2007 election violence in Kenya, the Kenyan Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission provided space to unearth fuller information about the making of Nyayo House and the events that took place in the secret chambers. Like the Sanlam Building, this was in many ways an apparently ordinary building. Nothing on the outside in any way indicated what was taking place on the sixth floor of Sanlam or in the basements of Nyayo. And despite these performative and ephemeral interventions, there has never been a permanent marker of this history or any formal declaration as ‘heritage’ at either site. The Sanlam Building, or Biko House, has been marked in other ways – many of them ephemeral, performative or otherwise embodied. Some commemorative activity around the thirty-year anniversary of Biko’s death in 2007 was centred on the building. At this time, the Steve Biko Foundation in Biko’s hometown of Ginsburg, near the city of East London 230 kilometres away, was embarking on a project to develop a heritage trail linked to the life of Biko. This trail focused largely on sites in Ginsburg and East London, including a nomination to declare the Biko family home a provincial heritage site. Although neither Biko House nor the Walmer police station was named in this way, or included on this official ‘heritage trail’, the foundation did drive a programme of events branded as ‘30:30’ around these sites. These included an exhibition in Room 619 on deaths in detention and several film screenings, seminars and events. Since 2011, the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD) at the local university have run an annual commemorative programme in September each year, along with student groups. One of the most

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interesting ­interventions in this space has been led by Walmer resident and heritage activist Simphiwe Msizi, who has worked closely with CANRAD to develop a series of ‘Biko Conversations’ with young activists and students. Msizi runs a heritage activist non-­ governmental organisation called Ezingcanjini African Heritage, a Xhosa word meaning ‘from the roots’, and has campaigned for years for recognition of the history of this building and of Biko’s links to the city more generally. After many years and campaigns for official recognition of Biko House, from many different quarters, plans to renovate and reuse the building in a way commensurate with its history finally gained some traction in 2016. A social housing construction company called Qhama Social Housing Institute bought the property for R10 million (about £500,000) and, working with the provincial Department of Human Settlements, began a lengthy process to redevelop the building into subsidised apartments aimed at lowincome individuals and families. Along with two other neighbouring buildings, the development has become known as the Steve Biko Precinct. Construction is ongoing at the time of writing, and apartments are being advertised by Qhama for between R1200 and R2800 a month (£60 to £140). This process has, of course, not been free of contestation. At a public meeting called by the Eastern Cape Department of Human Settlements in 2016 to discuss plans for the building, participants raised questions about what it would mean to build housing over a site of detention and torture, and whether the infamous sixth floor should rather be maintained as a site of memory – whether in the form of a museum, a space of reflection in the notorious Room 619, or something else.28 There are no easy answers: in many ways it seems fitting to the memory of not only Biko but also others who suffered and died in this space that it be used to provide much-needed housing and access to the amenities of what was once the heart of the apartheid city. To transform a site of such violence and darkness into a space for safe, dignified housing, in the context of ongoing struggles and contestations over equality and spatial justice, is perhaps a tangible way to complete the various ‘cleansings’ that the building has undergone over the years. At the same time, there is no doubt that this is a site haunted by difficult memory: it seems ghoulish to turn a former interrogation room into a furnished ­bachelor

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Figure 37  Room 619, the interrogation room.

apartment (figure 37). As in so many instances in the making of memory and of urban space in contemporary South Africa, it seems that the only option is to somehow embrace the messiness and to sit with the discomfort of these spatial and psychic legacies.

Urban hauntings Roaming through the centre of Port Elizabeth, two aspects of its history are eminently visible in its architecture and its layout: firstly, it is a markedly colonial city, architecturally and spatially; secondly, it is a profoundly industrial city. Its early nineteenthcentury roots are tangibly visible in the Victorian curlicues of its public buildings, while its most important economic spaces have historically been the harbour and, later, the car factories and other industrial sites to its north. More recently, the Coega Industrial Development Zone has been established to kickstart new forms of industrial investment in a city that was effectively economically hollowed out by the collapse of the car industry in the 1980s. It is also a deeply segregated city, which has not yet been able to shake off these spatial and psychological boundaries: its racial

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demographics remain distributed in much the same form they were forced into by the Group Areas Act. How does one write an acknowledgement of inequality and of the dark histories that formed this inequality into city streets that continue, in many ways, to reverberate with this history? The Rhodes Must Fall protests were a powerful call by young South Africans, reading Fanon, Biko, Garvey and Cesaire, to finally dismantle and remake the structures of power that, in their experience, have not meaningfully shifted since the end of apartheid. And it is telling that the first object of this anger and this desire to break down and begin again was a public symbol of colonial power, and of an individual whose ambitions of economic conquest laid much of the groundwork for the physical segregation and the stripping of power from ordinary South Africans many years later. Many colonial and world war commemorative statues seem to fade into the background, no longer seen by those who pass them every day; yet, what Rhodes Must Fall has shown is that these symbols retain power, and this hidden or unnoticed power can surface in important and unexpected ways. There is a direct line between the removal of Rhodes and the jubilant occupation of space that happened when students in Cape Town stormed the gates of Parliament in 2015. Removing or rethinking statues is not enough, certainly; but the symbolism of who and what has the right to occupy day-today public space, to shape experiences of public and urban space, is a powerful corollary of calls for greater equality and a genuinely democratised citizenship. With the Route 67 project, the MBDA was trying to use public art to speak back to the city’s colonially determined public spaces  and historical spaces of exclusion. This public art project worked alongside urban design and ‘regeneration’ to interface with nineteenth-century buildings and monuments, and to create new senses of place-making and belonging for the twenty-first century. The selection of the Donkin Memorial as the starting moment for these interventions was not accidental: the symbolism of a space ‘gifted’ to the city’s inhabitants by a colonial governor was crucial. This reoccupation of space remains, however, necessarily incomplete. To be ‘public’ is not necessarily to be ‘democratic’, and to install public art in a space does not by necessity change the meanings of or people’s engagements with that space. The Donkin

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Reserve hill is, certainly, better used than it was prior to the MBDA’s renovations: the winding paths down the hill are regularly used by skateboarders and cyclists, children climb on the sculptures, and teenagers and families take selfies next to Mandela’s shadow. In this respect the space has grown a renewed sense of ‘publicness’ and of ownership through everyday use. At the same time, in these and other art interventions in the city’s public spaces – including the project in Singaphi Street – there is much that remains unsaid and unmarked. The difficult void of the Sanlam Building/Biko House is one such space, marked by a graffiti portrait and occasional ephemeral interventions, but never really integrated into the public ‘story’ of the city. In its new future function as social housing, this ephemeral story may emerge in other ways yet to be imagined. The city’s official public art programmes also cannot be divorced from a project of rebranding, in a city positioning itself as a tourist attraction and a centre for industrial and economic investment. Young artists, collectives and groups like Numb City have worked hard to harness the creative potential of a city where many young people leave for the perceived greener pastures of Johannesburg and Cape Town as soon as they can. This is a process that is of course not unique to Port Elizabeth, and there is a vast array of global examples of culture-led regeneration efforts to draw on in comparison – many of which have quite explicitly influenced planning processes both for the MBDA and for the team leading the Red Location precinct developments. The links between the city’s post2001 identity, its name and its rebranding efforts are most apparent in the strong and explicit ties made between the Route 67 project and Nelson Mandela’s biography. In this emphasis on heroic biography, however, much is obscured. Even the ephemeral or subversive appearances of Biko in public spaces, through things like poster art, performances and graffiti, remain representations in a sense of a Great Man, a heroic male biography that symbolically occupies public space. Biko’s image reflects a growing desire, particularly among young people, for a new kind of public politics. If anything, the kinds of public art that occupy the city centre have not done enough – and, indeed, intrinsically cannot do enough – to destabilise the histories written into the very shape of the city’s streets and buildings themselves. To wrap

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up the city’s divided and violent past in the form of Mandela under the flag on the hill is to deny the messiness of that history and its iterations in the present. Perhaps what is called for, and what the ghostly images of Biko on the city’s walls begin to point towards, is a way of thinking through public history, public space and public art in a way that both accounts for and allows space for messiness, subversion, multiple conversations and productive conflict. As the Red Location case study and the example of memory-making in spaces of forced removal have both indicated, there are limitations to the extent to which memory can be safely sequestered in museums, memorials and other spaces designated for it. This is especially true in a space where so much remains unresolved, unaddressed and waiting to resurface. The following chapter, the final case study in this book, reflects on the question of what happens to these messy, difficult pasts when there is no space afforded to them – either materially or, in many instances, even symbolically. It is here that the power of the past to leak into the present becomes materially apparent.

Notes   1 Steve Biko, ‘Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity’, 1978, reprint with new introduction by Nkosinathi Biko, in I Write What I Like, ed. Aelred Stubbs (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2004), 108.   2 Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane, Bavusile Maaba and Nkosinathi Biko, ‘The Black Consciousness Movement’, in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, vol. 2, ed. SADET (Pretoria: Unisa, 2004), 98–159.   3 Many of these school-based youth organisations were influenced by young teachers who had graduated from historically black universities where Black Consciousness had been deeply influential on the student bodies, such as Durban-Westville.   4 Janet Cherry and Pat Gibbs, ‘The Liberation Struggle in the Eastern Cape’, in SADET, Road to Democracy, vol. 2, 569–614.   5 Xolela Mangcu, Biko: A Biography (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012), 262–63.  6 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, vol. 3 (Cape Town, 1998).

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  7 Verne Harris, ‘Jacques Derrida Meets Nelson Mandela: Archival Ethics at the Endgame’, Archival Science 11, nos 1–2 (2010): 116.  8 Pierre Voges, ‘Competitive Local Economic Development through Urban Renewal in the City of Port Elizabeth, South Africa A’ (PhD thesis, University of Pretoria, 2013), 254.  9 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (London: Abacus, 1995). 10 Peggy Calata and Peter Stark, ‘Conceptual Framework for the “Century  Walk”: Nelson Mandela and the 100 Year Journey to a New Settlement at IBhayi’ (concept document prepared for the MBDA, 2009), 1. 11 Dorelle Sapere, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Port Elizabeth, 27 March 2012. 12 Sethembile Msezane, ‘Sethembile Msezane Performs at the Fall of the Cecil Rhodes Statue, 9 April 2015,’ Guardian, 15 May 2015, www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/15/sethembile-msezane-cecilrhodes-statue-cape-town-south-africa. 13 Miller and Schmahmann, ‘Introduction: Engaging with Public Art’. 14 Mcebisi Ndletyana and Denver A. Webb, ‘Social Divisions Carved in Stone or Cenotaphs to a New Identity? Policy for Memorials, Monuments and Statues in a Democratic South Africa’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 23, no. 2 (2017): 97–110. 15 Xolela Mangcu, ‘Eastern Cape Losing War of Memory’, Daily Dispatch, 29 April 2004. 16 Birthe Rytter Hansen, ‘Public Spaces for National Commemoration: The Case of Emlotheni Memorial, Port Elizabeth’, Anthropology and Humanism 28, no. 1 (2003): 43–60. 17 Workplace Consortium, ‘Environmental Upgrading of Singaphi Street, New Brighton: Heritage Report’, report no. MBDA TSP 03/12, Port Elizabeth, 2014. 18 Workplace Consortium, Singapi: Maps of Knowledge. A Collection of Untold Stories from the Community of New Brighton (Port Elizabeth: MBDA, 2016). 19 Zayd Minty, ‘Post-Apartheid Public Art in Cape Town: Symbolic Reparations and Public Space’, Urban Studies 43, no. 2 (2006): 421–40; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Report, vol. 6 (Cape Town, 2003). 20 Tim Hall and Iain Robertson, ‘Public Art and Urban Regeneration: Advocacy, Claims and Critical Debates’, Landscape Research 26, no. 1 (2001): 18. 21 Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

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22 Monwabisi Soxuza, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Port Elizabeth, 14 January 2014. 23 Max Matavire, ‘Biko Police Cell “Cleansed” as Part of Commemoration Events’, Herald, 9 September 2002; Max Matavire, ‘Azapo Organising Tributes for Biko’, Herald, 6 September 2004. 24 Nathan Ryan Millar, personal e-mail communication, 24 August 2014. Millar was the artist commissioned to paint the mural. 25 Sipho Masondo, ‘Ceremonial Cleansing for Cell where Biko Was Tortured’, Herald, 19 June 2006. 26 Ereshnee Naidu, From Nyayo House to Godown Centre: A Needs Assessment of Memorialization Initiatives in Kenya (New York: International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, 2010); Citizens for Justice, We Lived to Tell: The Nyayo House Story (Nairobi: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2003). 27 Citizens for Justice, We Lived to Tell, ix. 28 Siyamtanda Capa, ‘Questions Raised over Torture Building’, Herald, 30 September 2016.

5

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Politics of recognition: The Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho

Locating Amabutho history 21 March 2012: a blazing hot, late-summer day in the township of Langa in Uitenhage. In the rest of South Africa, the 21 March public holiday, Human Rights Day, commemorates the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, where the South African police in the Vaal township of Sharpeville shot several fleeing protesters in  the back at an antipass protest. In the Eastern Cape, though, and  especially here in Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth, 21 March is used to commemorate another massacre that took place on this day twenty-five years later, in 1985: the Langa Massacre. On this particular day in 2012, the municipality, along with the local ANC branch, have organised a commemorative day at a community hall in Langa. The day begins with a wreath-laying ceremony at the brand new memorial a short walk from the hall, marking the spot where police opened fire on a crowd of m ­ ourners walking from Langa to a funeral in nearby KwaNobuhle. After the ceremony, people filter out to walk across a field to the hall where the rest of the ‘official’ programme will take place. Attendees are treated to speeches from politicians and from one or two survivors of the 1985 events, performances by local dance troupes and singers, and a public-speaking competition for high school students. As the memorial area empties out, a group of about thirty men makes its way in the opposite direction, up the brick pathway towards the memorial, singing and toyi-toying. Most are dressed in the black, green and gold of the ANC, a few in the red shirts of the SACP. At the front of the group, two men hold up a banner that identifies them, in red and black block capitals, as the Nelson

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Figure 38  Amabutho outside the community hall in Langa, Uitenhage, at Human Rights Day commemorations.

Mandela Bay Amabutho, with the subscript ‘Roar Young Lions’. At the memorial the banner is held aloft. A familiar high-contrast image of Che Guevara dominates the centre. One-third of the banner is taken up with a collaged design of images of homemade weaponry: a tyre, a box of matches, a portable gas stove, a gun, a petrol bomb. The other edge bears the emblems of the ANC, the SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the three members of the ruling ‘Tripartite Alliance’, with the words ‘Enough is Enough’ (figure 38). As the struggle against apartheid intensified in South African townships during the 1980s, young activists were often the most visible at the forefront of resistance on the ground. During this period, young people in droves took up the exiled ANC’s call to ‘make South Africa ungovernable’, forming militant bands who defended township space, protected leaders, and meted out punishment to suspected ‘informers’ or people suspected in some way of supporting ‘the system’. In Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage, these groups of youth – often no more than young teenagers, aged between twelve and twenty – formed quasi-military groups and called themselves the Amabutho.1 While such groups existed countrywide, the

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Politics of recognition 169

Eastern Cape youth were especially well organised. They were structured along military lines, integrated with a system of street and area committees.2 Many former Amabutho members still unequivocally refer to themselves as soldiers: the military nature of these groups is an important marker of identity right into the present. In 2007, some of the former members of the Amabutho formed the group now carrying its banner outside the Human Rights Day events. Members, mostly men in their forties and fifties (and a handful of women), include those who identified as Amabutho during the conflicts of the mid-1980s. Some, particularly the women in the group, identify themselves as ‘marshals’, young activists who came through movements such as the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) in the early 1980s. The Amabutho were tacitly supported but never a formal arm of any of the liberation movements or parties. Unlike, for example, former members of MK  – the ANC’s underground armed wing – Amabutho are not recognised as combatants and as such have no access to special pensions or other forms of material support. Their history has found little traction in the city’s public histories. The majority of those who belong to the reconstituted group today are unemployed, scraping together a living off social grants. Many never completed school, having left formal education under the credo of ‘liberation first, education later’.3 In the face of the lack of public acknowledgement of their history, the Amabutho have had to inscribe their history into public space and public consciousness by other means. One of the group’s driving aims is to agitate for material and symbolic recognition of its contribution to what one member terms ‘the last war of apartheid’. Like the traces of forced removals that remain half-submerged in the landscape around South End and elsewhere, the memory of Amabutho activity is embedded in the ordinary landscapes of the city: street corners, backyards and storm drains in Veeplaas, Kwazakele and New Brighton, which bear no obvious traces of the events that played out in this landscape thirty or forty years ago. The members of the reconstituted Amabutho group use orality, song, performance and the physical movement of bodies through space to make this history visible. This is a performative and activist heritage, unmoored from the memorials and buildings that might contain and neutralise this memory.

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As will become apparent while unravelling the story of the Amabutho in this chapter, this is a history that does not comfortably fit into dominant narratives of the South African past and the antiapartheid struggle. What stakes are involved in commemorating this group, why has this history receded in collective public narratives of struggle, and how might this history be revisited? This chapter considers these questions alongside a history of how the Amabutho was founded, its activities during the 1980s, and the strategies of commemoration and evocation of the past which the group undertakes now in the absence of ‘official’ recognition. As an underground group, the Amabutho kept few written records. In comparison with the well-documented histories of MK or the resistance movement in exile, there is little secondary published material on the Amabutho. Activist and historian Janet Cherry has written some excellent histories of underground activism in South Africa in the 1980s, which include some discussion of the Amabutho in the Eastern Cape;4 and Mark Swilling’s doctoral thesis on urban control and conflict in Uitenhage between 1977 and 1986 looks in some detail at the role of the Amabutho in Uitenhage in this period.5 The activities of ‘young lions’ in South African townships appear in some texts on the history of the struggle and the UDF in the 1980s,6 but otherwise they are most strongly evoked through oral history and personal memory of those who lived through this period. Consequently, much of the texture of the Amabutho’s story in this chapter is drawn from interviews, workshops, discussions and site visits, most of which took place between 2012 and 2015. In these recollections, the fallibility of memory and the power of myth are apparent in stories with multiple endings, or the conflation of distinct time periods into single events. At the same time, certain narratives appear again and again in interviews and conversations. My approach in writing this section draws on that used by Monique Marks in her account of young activists from Diepkloof, Soweto.7 Marks argues that particularly in situations where the historical record is scant, oral accounts act as an important archive of occluded material. More importantly, such accounts reveal the meaning of memories for those who carry them: these meanings become visible in the way the past is framed and transmitted. In this instance, oral accounts raise particular questions: who speaks for



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the history of the Amabutho, and to what purpose? What different perceptions exist of this history and how can these multiple perceptions be simultaneously ‘true’? In what ways do the Amabutho understand and experience this history as a collective resource?

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Youth and resurgent activism: Political conflict in the 1980s The growth of the Amabutho in the Eastern Cape in the 1980s paralleled the emergence of similar youth-driven movements elsewhere, including Soweto, the Vaal and the Western Cape. The activists of the 1980s built on the student movements that had led the resurgence of activism in the 1960s and 1970s under the mantle of Black Consciousness. In Port Elizabeth, political struggles were deeply influenced by the trade union movement, a longstanding driver of political mobilisation which became very important in developing links between workers’ movements, underground political structures and civic organisations. The continuing influence of the 1976 student uprisings on youth politics through the 1980s cannot be overstated. Many of the Amabutho members who were too young to participate directly in these protests recall watching them, or had much-admired older siblings who participated. Some of the older Amabutho did participate in the uprisings of the late 1970s, and these experiences greatly impacted the conflicts of the 1980s. In Port Elizabeth, Kwazakele High School was the epicentre of student revolts, playing a similar role to that of Morris Isaacson High in Soweto.8 In September 1976, forty-three students from Kwazakele High were arrested. Ten turned state witness, and thirty-one were sentenced to five years on Robben Island in January 1977.9 This was the fate of many of the ‘1976 generation’, typically given five-year sentences. Many, of course, emerged from prison even more deeply politicised and committed to struggle than they had gone in, following interactions with the long-term imprisoned leadership of the ANC, Pan-Africanist Congress and other ­movements. Andile Kondlo recalls this spate of arrests: We decided we can organise some equipment to attack all of the centres of government, like bottle stores, so we were moving with

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Maqanda Road to destroy all that because we were angry with Bantu Education … We destroyed all the buildings of government, the bottle store and the market … That time, I remember well, I was fourteen years old. Other comrades of mine were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years of age … After that there was a big raid. They were moving to chase all the youth of that time to arrest us. We were arrested after ’76, and some of us were sentenced to six months behind bars, but some of our comrades were sent to Robben Island.10

The first anniversary of 16 June and then the death of Biko in detention in September 1977 added further fuel to the fire. By the end of 1977, none of the thirty-nine thousand school-age children in Port Elizabeth’s townships were attending classes. Cherry and Gibbs have enumerated the violent clashes between young people and police throughout 1977 and 1978, including thousands of arrests, shootings, and the assault and torture of detainees.11

COSAS and youth activism in the early 1980s In June 1979, a group of young activists came together to form the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), funded by the ANC in exile.12 Significantly, COSAS was the first organisation since the banning of the ANC in March 1960 to adopt the Freedom Charter as a set of guiding principles.13 This represented a shift away from the Black Consciousness philosophies which had politicised the 1976 generation, and towards a Charterist politics aligned with the ANC’s principles. Cherry and Gibbs ascribe this shift to a combination of increasing ‘armed propaganda’ emanating from the ANC, and the influence of older ANC cadres on a new generation of leaders who had been imprisoned on Robben Island following the 1976 uprisings.14 Kgomotso Mkadimeng, one of the founding members of COSAS’s first executive, recalls in an interview with Nokuthula Mazibuko: After the banning of SASM and SASO … I was introduced officially into the movement. It must have been the beginning of ’78 … We were then instructed to form a new organisation … The ANC gave us strict instructions to ensure that the new organisation shows in no way affiliation to the ANC … We thought these guys are not realistic, there’s no way we are not going to show that WE are Charterists. So



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we went through the country and met a number of influential youth leaders who were influential in their different schools and we met at Wilgespruit and formed the Congress of South African Students … Those of us who were defiant really wanted [the name] COSAS so that Congress comes out somewhere … And in November, the whole executive of COSAS was arrested, because the system knew it was an ANC front.15

For the founding members of COSAS, the organisation’s formation was considered a crucial next step after 1976. Students felt the weight of responsibility to take this struggle forward: ‘We saw ourselves as the generation that must face this … We felt that we had nothing to lose.’16 This is echoed by Mncedisi Sitoto, who was active in youth movements in Uitenhage during this period and later via the trade union MACWUSA (Motor Assembly and Component Workers Union of South Africa): 1976, 77, 78, the repression is getting intensified but there’s no way that we could say, okay, our colleagues are in prison, therefore we decide to distance ourselves or say we surrender, we give up. And that’s why there were continuous programmes that continued with the call that we must change the conditions. But the contradiction was, the struggle still demanded us to be torch bearers … And that is why some of us started to get into industries. Uitenhage is a town which enjoys industries, rubber, tyres, motor assembly, motor sectors … And so some of us starting working, but continuing with political work. And that’s why some of us were also members of trade unions.17

COSAS had strong support in the Eastern Cape, with three of its first four presidents hailing from Port Elizabeth. However, the congress almost immediately came under fire from the state, which was determined to stamp out the rising wave of youth protest that had begun in 1976. Twenty of its leaders were arrested in late 1979, and in the early 1980s prominent COSAS activists with links to MK became targets of police violence and assassination. Sizwe Kondile, a COSAS activist from Port Elizabeth, was abducted and killed in Lesotho in 1981. In April 1982 Topsy Madaka and Simphiwo Mtimkulu were abducted in Port Elizabeth and killed at Post Chalmers, a remote farm that doubled as the security police’s secret detention and torture site in the Eastern Cape – analogous to the notorious Vlakplaas in the north of the country.18

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When Mtimkulu disappeared, he was in the process of suing the government for poisoning him with thallium while he was in detention. Mark Kaplan’s extraordinary 2004 documentary Between Joyce and Remembrance follows the story of the family’s search for truth via the TRC, as well as a subsequent visit to the Mtimkulu household by former security police officer Gideon Niewoudt to ask for forgiveness. In the documentary, Mtimkulu’s parents sit stonyfaced, refusing to absolve Niewoudt for his actions. At one point, Mtimkulu’s son – a baby when he died, a teenager by the time the film was made – emerges from the shadows of his grandparents’ living room to dramatically break a glass vase over Niewoudt’s head in a rage. In many ways this moment encapsulates the profound need for a space for anger and for the refusal to forgive or reconcile that is overlooked by many ‘official’ projects of postapartheid public memory.19 A nationwide school boycott in 1980 was one of COSAS’s early successes. Gerhart and Glaser argue that while the 1976 uprisings had galvanised resistance, the grievances which had sparked these protests had not been addressed, and the quality of black students’ education remained an issue.20 The 1980 boycotts first broke out in the Western Cape, soon spreading to other parts of the country. In the first few months of 1980, seventy-seven high schools were forced to close countrywide. The Eastern Cape, with its high levels of student organisation and political participation, was, according to Gerhart and Glaser, the ‘most militant flashpoint’ of this boycott, although not the originator.21 In many ways, as Jeremy Seekings has outlined, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the construction of ‘the youth’ as a potent political force.22 Many accounts of this period make note of the intensity of activists’ resistance to the state, referring to COSAS in the years between 1980 and 1983 as ‘aggressively confident’ on the back of locally based youth congresses the organisation set up in Port Elizabeth as well as in Soweto, the Western Cape and elsewhere.23 After 1983, COSAS became a key ally of the newly established UDF, and was the first major UDF affiliate banned by the state under the first State of Emergency in August 1985. The 1976 uprisings catalysed a powerful sense that revolutionary change was indeed possible, preceding the establishment of numerous youth and civic organisations and the formation of the UDF. These ­organisations

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Politics of recognition 175

and movements, in particular the UDF, would remain at the vanguard of struggle until the negotiated settlement of the 1990s.24 The 1976 uprisings and their representations in South African public history and culture have rendered them iconic of the martyrdom of youth in the final decades of the struggle. 16 June is observed nationally every year as ‘Youth Day’, and the Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto and an associated heritage trail have placed 1976 firmly within the tourism and public history imaginaries of Johannesburg. (Hector Pieterson was the first child known to have been shot by police during the uprisings: Sam Nzima’s photograph of Mbuyisa Makhubu carrying his body, while Hector’s sister Antoinette runs alongside, has become a globally recognisable icon.25) June 16 1976 has been constructed as an emblematic moment in post-apartheid public history narratives, and as part of new national foundational mythologies.26 The militant youth of the 1980s, however, have not found their way into South African public culture in the same way. The reasons for this are multiple and unclear: certainly the youth of 1976 are easier to position unambiguously as martyrs or as victims, while the young activists of the mid-1980s occupy a more complex position. They inflicted violence, and also had violence perpetrated against them. They traumatised others, including many in their own communities, and were traumatised and brutalised themselves. They were victims of unimaginable state brutality, while defending themselves against any and all perceived representatives of ‘the system’ with homemade weapons. This ambiguity has left the Amabutho and others of the same generation difficult to insert into a simplistic narrative of righteous struggle or of post-conflict nation-building, of the kind emblematised by the Mandela figure and the flag on the hill at the Donkin Memorial.

Civic resistance and people’s power This period in the late 1970s and early 1980s also saw the establishment of new civic and labour organisations that would come to play an important role in the struggles of the 1980s, especially as drivers of grassroots and popular mobilisation. The burgeoning civics movement at this time drew on longer histories of residential organisation, taking a more overtly political turn in the 1980s

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as it became clear that living conditions and rentals could not be separated from political action.27 Civic movements often had to negotiate between two poles of action: many initially tried to remain separate from political struggles, focusing on goals which seemed more attainable in the medium term around housing issues, rents, and service provision.28 However, under increasing repression and growing levels of popular mobilisation in the 1980s, these seemingly mundane issues became increasingly difficult to address without also engaging in political action. In 1977, the advisory boards that had functioned as the only form of state-recognised political representation for black residents were replaced by elected ‘community councils’. These had the surface appearance of democratic functioning in that they were chosen by election; however, they were state-controlled and had little real power to effect change. As a result, community councils became seen as toothless puppet institutions, and turnout for these elections was extremely low. In Port Elizabeth, for example, the 1978 community council ballot saw a turnout of only 11.2% of eligible residents.29 The newly emergent civics, on the other hand, defined themselves and their mission in direct opposition to these councils. As Colin Bundy has suggested, the establishment of the councils now meant that the face of apartheid administration was not a distant statemanaged bureaucracy, but could be linked with people who lived in the townships, to familiar neighbours, family members, friends and fellow residents. As will become apparent through the story of the Amabutho, this had enormously destructive consequences for social cohesion as the visible presence of the state, the army and the police in townships increased in the mid-1980s, especially after the first State of Emergency. Because they now represented ‘the system’, community councillors became particular targets for the hostility of young activists like the Amabutho.30 In Port Elizabeth, the major active civic was the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation (PEBCO). PEBCO was founded in 1979 under the leadership of Thozamile Botha, who worked at the Ford motor factory and had been a teacher at Kwazakele High when the 1976 uprisings broke out. PEBCO, and later its youth and women’s wings, was highly influential in local politics and ­ organisation through the early to mid-1980s. Significantly, it was one of the earliest of the politicised civic organisations of this period to be

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established; most such organisations only really took off alongside or just after the 1983 launch of the UDF.31 Thozamile Botha was arrested following a Ford strike in January 1980, along with four other members of PEBCO’s executive. The five were released at the end of February, but remained under banning orders. Botha left South Africa soon thereafter to join the ANC in Lesotho.32 The resulting lacuna in leadership so soon after PEBCO’s founding led to its near collapse, which Lodge and Nasson have attributed partly to the organisation’s failure to develop ‘democratically structured neighbourhood branches’ in order to decentralise leadership.33 It took some time for PEBCO to re-emerge as a powerful local force. In 1984, Edgar Ngoyi and Henry Fazzie – veteran activists with long backgrounds in the ANC underground and the trade union movement – returned to Port Elizabeth following their release from Robben Island and joined the PEBCO executive. Under their leadership, PEBCO was restructured as a grassroots-oriented organisation in the Charterist tradition, incorporating both ‘old guard’ and young activists influenced by the seismic political events of the 1970s.34 Together, the civics and the youth organisations were to ‘set the political pace in the Eastern Cape as a whole’ through the 1980s.35 In 1983, women in PEBCO formed the Port Elizabeth Women’s Organisation (PEWO) under the leadership of Ivy Gcina and Buyiswa Siwisa. Many of PEWO’s leaders were veterans of the women’s struggles of the 1950s led by organisations such as the  Federation of South African Women, including Adelaide Mabude and Ntutu Mabhala.36 PEWO joined the growing number of women’s organisations being formed around the country at this time, several of which joined forces in 1987 to form the UDF Women’s Congress.37 From accounts by its founding members, PEWO was widely understood as a local front for the banned ANC Women’s League. Its primary purpose was centred on the ‘building of Congress hegemony’, drawing on memories of women’s activism in the 1950s and providing education on women’s historic role in the struggle within these traditions. Although it was founded by older women, veterans of earlier struggles, over time young women began to join PEWO alongside the rise of the youth movements, often pushing for a more militant form of activism than PEWO’s founding cohort were comfortable with.38

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Many of the civics also established youth wings, which worked alongside COSAS. In Port Elizabeth, the Port Elizabeth Youth Congress (PEYCO) was launched in 1983, led by Mkhuseli Jack, who had been instrumental in establishing COSAS in Port Elizabeth.39 Lodge and Nasson characterise the primary constituents of youth congresses in the Eastern Cape as ‘unemployed school leavers’, who, ‘lacking the institutional focus provided by school or the workplace … tended to concentrate on political concerns’.40 Or, as a former PEYCO member explained it to me: ‘Inside school, you were COSAS; outside and after school, it was PEYCO.’41 PEYCO and its equivalent in Uitenhage, the Uitenhage Youth Congress, were well organised with a strong network of neighbourhood branches, broadly loyal to the older leadership of PEBCO. The period from 1979 to 1983 thus saw the building of the mass urban movements in Port Elizabeth which, along with a historically powerful trade union presence, would be at the forefront of local political struggle throughout the 1980s.42 In August 1983, the UDF was established at a conference in Mitchell’s Plain in Cape Town, as an amalgamated umbrella front for the banned and exiled liberation movements. The UDF’s earliest campaigns were in reaction to the National Party’s proposed 1984 constitutional reforms, which advocated a ‘tri-cameral’ parliament with separate representation for whites, coloureds and Indians. While this would extend some parliamentary representation if not genuine political power to coloured and Indian South Africans, black South Africans would remain without representation other than the despised community councils and the toothless, rural ‘Bantustan’ parliaments. As the 1980s wore on, under the extreme repression of the various successive States of Emergency, the UDF would come to play a vital role as the face of the liberation movements. At its outset it defined its aim as ‘the creation of a united democratic South Africa, free of Bantustan and Group Areas and based on the will of the people’.43 The UDF was somewhat slow to garner support in the Eastern Cape initially. Jeremy Seekings has attributed this to the perception that the UDF was focused on galvanising coloured and Indian support against the constitutional reforms, while activists in the Eastern Cape were more focused on building mass-based and

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underground working-class movements.44 Nonetheless, over time it would become increasingly important to activism in the Eastern Cape, under the leadership of those who had come through the student movements and school boycotts of the early 1980s, such as Mkhuseli Jack, and activists who had been released from Robben Island in 1982–1983, such as Stone Sizani and Mike Xego. Many of these individuals went on to play a vital role in the leadership of UDF affiliates during 1984–1985. Activists who drove local resistance in Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage in the mid-1980s were thus connected with several different organisations, many brought together under the UDF umbrella with common goals. These included, among others, PEBCO, PEWO, the banned ANC, SACP and other political parties, and trade unions such as MACWUSA. This was the political climate in which the Amabutho would emerge in 1984–1985: one of intense repression met with intense resistance, driven by several interrelated organisations, drawing on much longer histories of local activism and rooted in the fundamental concept of ‘people’s power’.

Making South Africa ungovernable The UDF’s very first campaign was a boycott of the municipal elections scheduled for the country’s townships in November 1983, under the recently passed Black Local Authorities Act.45 Alongside the boycott, rallies were organised to protest the upcoming constitutional referendum, while the ‘Million Signatures’ campaign galvanised support against the proposed new tri-cameral system. By mid-1984, the UDF had launched a campaign to boycott the upcoming parliamentary elections, leading – as had been the case with the community council elections – to extremely low voter turnout. Just before these elections, fourteen UDF leaders were detained, the first of many detentions, bannings and restrictions on the organisation’s activities.46 On 3 September 1984, as the new constitution came into force, violent protest broke out in the Vaal Triangle townships: [A]ngry mobs roamed the streets, burning businesses, government buildings, and cars; throwing stones; battling with the police; and

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killing several municipal councillors. The longest and most widespread period of sustained black protest against white rule in South Africa had begun.47

These uprisings would sweep across the country’s townships, in a wave of revolt driven largely by young people, some politicised through the BCM and the 1976 uprisings, others via COSAS and the civic-aligned youth movements. The immediate catalyst was a school boycott organised by COSAS, which began in Atteridgeville outside Pretoria in April 1984 and quickly spread to other parts of the Vaal Triangle and the Eastern Cape.48 Demands included the institution of elected representative councils; an end to corporal punishment, sexual harassment and the exclusion of over-age pupils; the provision of books and stationery; and better-qualified teachers. These boycotts were followed by rising confrontations  between township residents and the municipal councils, fuelled by rent increases, retrenchments and high levels of unemployment. In August 1984 rent increases were announced in Vereeniging, leading civic groups in the Vaal to call for rent boycotts, further school boycotts and a stayaway (general strike) on 3 September. The 3 September stayaway ignited years of revolt continuing into the late 1980s. The state’s response was swift and brutal, with police moving in with tear gas, rubber bullets and, in some instances, live ammunition. This extreme repression simply made residents angrier and more determined. Once it had begun, the September uprising seemed unstoppable, rapidly spreading across the Vaal and leading the state to call in the army to suppress it. The sight of army vehicles and soldiers would soon become common in South Africa’s townships. In late October, a Transvaal Regional Stay-away Committee was formed, representing thirty-seven organisations, mostly trade unions and youth movements. The committee launched a call for another stayaway on 5 and 6 November, in which over a million people participated. The revolt soon spread to the Eastern Cape, which would become an epicentre of popular uprising over the next three years. Eastern Cape activists had, as Cherry phrases it, ‘little notion that their organisational efforts would contribute to a country-wide uprising on a scale never before seen in South Africa’,

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one which ‘caught not only the security forces, but the liberation movements in exile, off guard’.49 In the electoral reforms of 1984, thirty-six new township community councils had been formed countrywide. Of these, by July 1985 only five were still functioning, testifying to the 1984 revolt’s success in dismantling repressive structures of local government.50 In late 1984, via the ANC’s Radio Freedom based in Lusaka, Oliver Tambo saluted the participants in the August election boycotts and reiterated an earlier call by Thabo Mbeki to ‘make South Africa ungovernable and make apartheid unworkable’. Tambo praised the fact that ‘a distinctive feature of this all-round crisis facing the oppressor class is that the initiative has shifted into the hands of the people and continues so to shift’.51 This call was highly influential on the militant youth organisations and is often repeated in oral accounts of the history of the Amabutho, seen as being at the core of the group’s mission in 1985–1986.52 By the end of 1984, young people and school students were engaging in ‘pitched battles’ with police in Kwazakele, having taken the call for ‘ungovernability’ on board as a serious strategy.53 But who were these young people who were battling police in the streets with stones, bricks and rudimentary homemade weapons? In the ANC’s 8 January 1985 statement, Tambo declared: The students and working youth of our country have once more confirmed their place in our hearts as the pride of the nation … We can truly say that they have earned for themselves the honour of being called the Young Lions … We call upon the youth to take this year as their own and to use it as a means to advance our own perspectives of youth participation in society, in development and in the struggle for peace.54

The ‘Young Lions’ referred to by Tambo were the young people placing themselves at the forefront of the struggle in the townships in the mid-1980s. In Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage, Amabutho ‘comrades’ viewed and organised themselves as people’s militia. Many were also members of PEYCO, and thus closely aligned with existing youth movements although they did not have any formal allegiance to existing political groups. Between PEYCO, COSAS and the militant actions of the Amabutho, youth took centre stage in the militant conflicts of the mid-1980s.55

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The young lions in the Eastern Cape The young people who would later be formalised as the Amabutho first began to organise in late 1984. Initially, these groups of youths formed defensive units protecting the homes of UDF leaders during the intense conflict between UDF- and AZAPO-aligned activists that exploded in Port Elizabeth’s townships around this time. Later, such groups also organised around school and rent boycotts. From late 1985, they were formalised under a quasimilitary structure organised around bases, with a tiered system of generals, commanders and political commissars. This system was established partially via intervention by PEBCO and PEYCO, who believed that militant youth needed to be brought under control and under the discipline of existing political structures. They were concerned with ensuring that the Amabutho were acting programmatically and that unnecessary violence was contained. This military structure distinguished the Amabutho from politically active youth elsewhere in the country aligned with COSAS or civic youth organisations. Seekings distinguishes between ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘liberatory’ means of characterising the politicised youth who emerged in the 1980s, and both these views have been applied to the Amabutho. Taking an ‘apocalyptic’ view, for example, in a 1986 article Swilling and Lodge describe the Amabutho as undisciplined, illiterate and meting out violence with no clear political program: The Amabuthu [sic] of the Eastern Cape – mainly boys between 12 and 16 years old – have had at best only a few years of primary schooling. They are unemployed, virtually illiterate … living in packs of 100 or 200 strong in what they call ‘bases’ on the fringes of the poorest squatter camps … They have little knowledge of the intricacies of formal political organisations. Instead, they have fashioned their own military structure … They may not have a program but they do have guns and grenades.56

Similarly, Gerhart and Glaser argue that these ‘non-schoolgoing youth lacked the political sophistication’ of the students affiliated with COSAS, and that their actions were ‘often spontaneous and violent, dividing communities along generational lines’.57 The

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Amabutho members’ description of themselves is rather different, viewing themselves as the foot soldiers of the struggle at home, responsible for wresting control of the townships away from the security forces. Mbuyseli Jam, for example, who was an Amabutho general in Soweto-on-Sea, explains that it is important to record this history because ‘honestly, the last war of the apartheid struggle, it’s the Amabutho. ’80s was the last war: after ’80s, there was freedom. So those politics are hidden.’58 While Amabutho members acknowledge that they perpetrated acts of violence, this is never presented as random or wantonly destructive. It is described as carefully targeted and programmatic, a necessary part of the struggle against the ‘system’: We were inside, the military. As there is an MK outside, there was then inside a military, we called ourselves Amabutho. There were three leaders in each base. There is a General, there is a Political Commissar, there is a Commander … You can’t operate just if you want to operate. There is a command from, we used to call it our big house, where all the bases are taking their decisions from. So there in Soweto[-on-Sea], we called it Soviet, that was the base of all the bases: The headquarters of Amabutho, even the Amabutho of the whole Eastern Cape … We are the dying hearts. We grew up to the struggle, to this organisation of the ANC … We are very, very proud of what we were doing for our country … We were commanded by the high authority from Lusaka, by the name of OR Tambo. So we took all the instructions via our own generals and commissars in our underground bases inside the country. We did our best to destabilise this country so as to achieve our goals, to liberate totally this country from the evil system of apartheid.59

Memories such as these belie the idea of the Amabutho as ‘packs’ of ill-disciplined youth. Yet, the nature of the group, and its origins in relatively unorganised defensive formations during a period of extreme violence and inter-organisational fighting, also meant that there was room for blurred boundaries between Amabutho activists, schoolgoing youth, unorganised youth and criminal elements. The difficulty of separating these boundaries and types of political and ‘criminal’ activity is, in part, one of the difficulties facing attempts by former Amabutho members in the present to garner formal recognition and acknowledgement.

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Figure 39  Xolani Kota, former Amabutho leader, stands on the site of a former Amabutho base in Soweto-on-Sea.

From 1985 onwards, the Amabutho developed a highly disciplined military structure predicated on geographically based cells or ‘bases’, with a pyramidal structure of communication and political education.60 Bases included rooms and outbuildings used for meetings, particular houses or shacks, or even in one case a large tree (figure 39). They served as meeting and gathering points, where information was shared about upcoming planned actions. Each base was allocated a code name, such as Cuba, Syria, Angola and Kiwane. Mbuyiseli Jam recalls that the generals’ meetings where decisions were taken and collective actions planned were known as uKongolo (‘congress’). From these meetings, the generals would pass decisions and information to the members of their respective base. Jam explains: Those three elected guys from the bases, they were attending a meeting here at Kiwane, because it was the place that the system can’t easily come in, you know. So it’s where we discuss every operation, we discuss it here in Kiwane, so that those structures, the general, political commissar, commander, they go to their bases and give them to the Amabutho … so every base knows what is going to take place



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now. Maybe Mkhuseli Jack, or Mtiwabo Ndube, they call a rally at Dan Qeqe stadium. So Amabutho were there to defend people because the system, if they saw a toyi-toyi they just shoot, killing the people unnecessarily. That’s where Amabutho monitored the toyitoyis in such a way that the system can’t catch them. All those tactics were coming from here in Kiwane.61

Henderson Jacobs, an Amabutho leader from Veeplaas, corroborates this using the example of how the call to ‘make South Africa ungovernable’ was received and interpreted: When the call came from the ANC, you must make South Africa ungovernable, then we take all the leaders of the Amabutho, and we made a forum in Soweto[-on-Sea]. Then we informed them – so we take that call as the generals, and we supply that call to the areas … The aim of doing that, we don’t just do it, we must wait for the call: the time is this time, hit at this time, all over in South Africa … The government cannot run there and then there – if we hit everywhere, it won’t be able to go everywhere in South Africa.62

Jacobs explains that the source of such calls was most often Radio Freedom, the exiled ANC’s radio station. Radio Freedom was illegal and difficult to pick up, but nonetheless: We took it from Radio Freedom. Then from Radio Freedom, it’s going to the political commissars. Then the political commissars come to the generals. Then the generals inform the committee, and then supply it to the youth in the areas. We were always listening … it was hard to listen, because Radio Freedom was scarce that time. When you listen, it just breaks sometimes because it’s far away. So we’re listening, then maybe when we meet at Soweto, a comrade says in the forum meeting, comrades did you hear Radio Freedom, did you hear? Then we know there’s a call.63

Jam also explains that the bases operated as decision-making structures, sometimes resulting in attacks against individuals who were believed to be informers. It is not disputed that this occurred. However, he paints quite a different picture to Lodge and Swilling’s image of a loose-knit band with ‘guns but no program’, when explaining how these acts originated: Sometimes you’ll find we are deep in that umrabulo and then you’ll find a Hippo running around. It’s whereby we disperse and carry on

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and fight. And we will find out maybe there’s somebody who called the police that time. So we just check maybe, investigate, why did the system come? … Sometimes the community came to the Amabutho to say we saw somebody: uBani goes with the police, so then we find ok, it’s Bani who’s disturbing us, going and selling us there. So we try to find him. Most of the time, these people run away because they were afraid, they were afraid of the decisions of Amabutho. Because the decisions of Amabutho, they were decisions that are tough: in other words, sometimes the decision takes lives.64

Strategies of resistance Popular revolt escalated throughout 1985, as violent state repression led to further violence from resistors, creating an ongoing cycle: ‘funerals leading to more funerals, attacks leading to counterattacks’.65 Violence escalated dramatically in the first half of 1985. In March that year, eight Uitenhage Amabutho members were killed by police. The funeral was to take place in KwaNobuhle, one of the Uitenhage townships, on 21 March, the twenty-five-year anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre. Unknown to attendees, the funeral had been banned the previous day, giving the police the power to prevent it from taking place. The marchers’ route took them past the outskirts of the ‘white’ town of Uitenhage, where they were intercepted by armed vehicles. The police opened fire, killing around twenty people (although estimates vary) and wounding at least forty, in what would become known as the Langa Massacre.66 In May 1985, three PEBCO leaders were abducted by security police at the Port Elizabeth airport. Sipho Hashe, Qaqawuli Godolozi and Champion Galela were killed at Post Chalmers. The details of their murders emerged only at the TRC hearings, where those responsible were denied amnesty.67 Shortly thereafter, in June, Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkhonto, Fort Calata and Sicelo Mhlauli, who would become known as the Cradock Four, were abducted and killed while returning to Cradock from a UDF meeting in Port Elizabeth. Their funeral was attended by around sixty thousand people, the largest political funeral to date. On the same day as the funeral, President P.W. Botha declared a State of Emergency in thirty-six districts, including Port Elizabeth,

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e­ssentially placing these areas under martial law. The State of Emergency was later extended to the entire country and renewed every year until the unbanning of the liberation movements and political parties in 1990. In late 1985, as local government structures began to break down in the face of sustained protest, the UDF adopted a strategy of ‘people’s power’, calling for urban residents to take over these structures to maintain social order and services at a grassroots level. A system of street and area committees, pioneered by the Cradock Residents’ Association under the leadership of Matthew Goniwe, was vital to this strategy. This system soon spread through the Eastern Cape, and later to other parts of the country, including the Vaal. Each street had an elected committee, which in turn elected members to an area committee. This strategy was resilient against state repression as leadership was dispersed, and allowed residents to participate directly in political decisions and action. The street committees also exercised a measure of social control in the form of crime prevention or ‘people’s courts’. Within this context of escalating violence and repression, the Amabutho became increasingly active. Their overall mission was to fight ‘the system’, which included direct confrontation with the police; enforcing consumer boycotts; and punishing and, in some cases, killing those suspected of being ‘informers’ or collaborators, including local councillors and black policemen seen as propping up apartheid. Sometimes innocent people were caught up in these actions. At times, civilians were attacked, injured or killed, ‘sometimes for as little as being the girlfriend of a policeman, or distributing government welfare parcels’.68 While the Amabutho carried out these actions with a clear programmatic goal in mind, many people lost their lives or loved ones in the ensuing violence of this period, both at the hands of the police and at the hands of the ‘young lions’. As Cherry points out, while there were isolated incidents in which the Amabutho successfully attacked police and security forces, the majority of those killed were black township residents. This was largely a question of accessibility: if the Amabutho’s goal was to attack ‘the state’, the most accessible targets were local councillors, informers, police who lived in the township, and their partners or families. In terms of commemorating these actions, then, there is a measure of ambivalence: in this period the powerful tactic of

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‘ungovernability’ became a reality, but at the same time innocent people with no connection to the apartheid state’s systems of power were caught up in the violence that characterised this time. Consumer, rent, school and bus boycotts were widely used and effective tactics. The Amabutho played a role in organising and ensuring compliance with these. Although fundamentally non-­ violent tactics of struggle, stayaways and strikes would often result in violence. In March 1985, after a threatened boycott by PEBCO had successfully prevented rent increases levied by the Khayamnandi council, PEBCO and the youth congresses proposed a stayaway for the weekend of 16–17 March. During this stayaway, which became known as ‘Black Weekend’, ‘violent clashes took place between police and bands of amabuthu [sic] (comrade street-fighters) in which two people were killed in Langa. The stayaway was backed by 90 percent of the African workers in Port Elizabeth.’69 The first consumer boycotts of white-owned businesses took place in Port Alfred in May 1985. In early July, a similar boycott was called in Port Elizabeth by a group of 150 women. In order to drive this, a Consumer Boycott Committee was formed, led by PEYCO president Mkhuseli Jack. The boycott was launched on 15  July, shortly before the declaration of the first State of Emergency. Three political demands were added to the initial grievances: the end of the State of Emergency, the release of political prisoners and the withdrawal of security forces from the townships.70 Although boycotts themselves were non-violent means of resistance, adherence was strictly policed by the Amabutho and allied youth activists. Henderson Jacobs recalls that: I was monitoring the people that they mustn’t go and buy in town. In the morning, early in the morning. We check the skaftins, because the people mustn’t buy in town. Each and every one must have a skaftin, so they must bring food from home … And when they come back to town, check the bags again, that they didn’t buy there. If they buy there, we take those things, we destroy them in front of them. Then you eat nothing … They just cry and squeal, all those things. We cannot do otherwise. If we all want the country to be free, we must sacrifice.71

Lungelwa Makina, a COSAS marshal who worked closely with the Amabutho, recalls that people would sometimes be punished for



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breaking the boycott by being forced to immediately and humiliatingly eat what they had bought:

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I was deployed next to the railway station for those from work, or from town. So we can check the bags and the plastics … If you bought meat, you are going to eat it, now! If you bought paint – we are going to paint you. If you bought soap, we are going to mix with water, and you drink it, right now.72

In Port Elizabeth, the boycott’s effect was so strongly felt by city centre businesses that the Port Elizabeth Chamber of Commerce (PECC) issued a call for black participation in central government. The boycott was similarly effective across the Eastern Cape: in September 1985, business owners from sixteen towns agreed to make a collective call to national government that municipalities should be desegregated.73 In Port Elizabeth, the head of the PECC successfully lobbied the state for the release of UDF leaders, enabling the suspension of the consumer boycott in November 1985. Cherry recalls that this success, along with the subsequent withdrawal of the South African Defence Force (SADF) from the townships and the lifting of the State of Emergency at the end of 1985, ‘resulted in a real feeling of popular empowerment’.74 Rent boycotts were a method of protest against high municipal rents for substandard housing and services. Kwazakele Amabutho members recall a 1985 rent boycott directed against Thamsanqa Linda, a much-despised local councillor who was later driven out of the city: The rent boycott started when uHashe and PEBCO are still alive … So what happened is, Linda came in, Thamsanqa Linda, and took the prices high. So the parents couldn’t afford to pay the rents … It made us angry because he was swearing at our parents and we knew that they didn’t have that kind of money.75

Creative tactics used by the Amabutho to prevent rent collection included removing numbers from houses: We started removing the street numbers in each house, together as Amabutho … So that they couldn’t identify which houses didn’t pay. Because what they used to identify houses, they used to look at those numbers made of plastic, so they removed those numbers.76

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At that time, there was a system in place where each family carried a ‘rent card’ produced when residents went to pay at the local rent office. In addition to the removal of house numbers, these cards were also destroyed: We had to use cards to pay rent at the rent office. What happened now was, they no longer carried those cards in our purses, our mothers, but what they did is they used to hide those cards s­omewhere … So to ensure that nobody paid the rent, we went to each and every ­household to take those cards away.77

The story of the ousting of Thamsanqa Linda from the township emerges repeatedly across the course of several interviews, group discussions and workshops. At this time, councillors and black police officers known as AmaTshaka were regular targets for attack by the Amabutho. Port Elizabeth’s townships were governed by the Khayamnandi Town Council, and at this time Linda was the mayor of this council, a position largely seen as a ‘puppet’ post. In August 1984, Linda evicted a woman named Alice Mavela and moved into her house in Veeplaas (figure 40). The militant young activists who would later be formalised as the Amabutho came to

Figure 40  Mrs Mavela’s house in Veeplaas, still in the possession of the Mavela family.

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Mavela’s defence, surrounding and attacking the house in order to force Linda to return it.78 The house was eventually returned to Mrs Mavela following the intervention of PEBCO and the Amabutho, but mistrust and anger towards Linda remained. Soon after this incident, the Khayamnandi Council implemented service charge and rent increases. In response, PEBCO threatened a boycott of rent offices, liquor stores and a shop owned by Linda. Relations between Linda and residents became increasingly antagonistic. Ultimately, as attacks on councillors and their homes escalated, councillors began to resign and the community council system collapsed. According to Van Kessels, the first instance of the use of ‘necklacing’ was the execution of Tamsanqa Kinikini in Uitenhage.79 Kinikini, who had carried out a ‘reign of terror’ in the Uitenhage townships, was the only councillor who had not resigned.80 (Kinikini’s killing and that of three of his sons took place after the funeral of the twenty-one people who had been killed in the Langa Massacre, which had marked an explosion of violence and retaliation in Uitenhage.81) With their lives in danger, councillors and others seen as apartheid collaborators, such as policemen, were forced to move out of the township altogether. Many went to KwaMagxaki, a middle-class township built by the city to house black professionals. In an oral history workshop in 2013 at which Amabutho members recorded some of these memories, the driving out of the councillors was described: We overpowered those councillors. We demolished the post office, we demolished the rent office, we burnt all those buildings down, rent office, post office, we burnt all those places down … The councillors ran away to KwaMagxaki and we ended up not paying rent.82

There were isolated incidents of attacks against SADF forces during this period, although they were not the most commonly accessible targets. Some of these attacks are remembered as iconic narratives in which the Amabutho was able to prevail over the agents of state control. Among these stories is one describing a technique used to trap ‘hippos’ (armoured personnel carriers) as they came into the township. Some of the former leadership of the Soweto-on-Sea Amabutho showed me a site along Bafana Road,

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the main thoroughfare into the area, where a large trench was dug to trap oncoming police vehicles: [W]hen the hippos were coming, comrades were digging a trench … They just make a fire on the other side. So the SADF think that some action is there when there’s a fire, they thought maybe that these comrades are burning someone, because they know that if there’s a tyre, there’s someone who’s in the tyre who’s burned. So they come with a strong-strong-strong speed. The comrades are standing round the shacks, they are armed, and also the petrol bombs, primus stoves … There’s just 1, 2, 3 soldiers inside this side; then at the back there’s two, they are looking that side; and at the front there were  two looking forward. That strategy, we see that and we say okay, these guys are looking that side and others are looking the other side. But at the end of the day, we are looking at them until they go in that trench. When they get that shock, it’s where we throw bombs, other guys throw the petrol ones – so that was our operations.83

As in the case above, many of the stories recounted by the Amabutho and extracted in this chapter are extraordinarily detailed, told and retold with precise descriptions of where and how events played out. We know that memory is fallible and defined by forgetting, especially in moments of high tension, drama or trauma. Indeed, in many instances the same story was told to me with multiple different endings and characters, but always with the same air of precision in the telling. The point here is not, of course, to mine these memories and narratives for ‘facts’, or even really to corroborate the oral history, but rather to highlight the extent to which these memories are the major resource at the Amabutho’s disposal. Stories and memories, linked to spaces that may have dramatically changed or where history has been rendered invisible, are the core of the group’s collective identity as well as demands for recognition. In these memories, the Amabutho is not simply a ragtag collection of angry youth; it comprises soldiers, highly disciplined and brave, operating from centrally issued commands and acting under the authority of the ANC. There is no room in these recountings for a truth that might be more ambiguous or murky than this. A great deal of the violence in Port Elizabeth’s townships at this time, as elsewhere in the country, was the result of clashes between Amabutho youth aligned to the UDF and those affiliated with the AZAPO, the political grouping which carried the banner of Black

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Consciousness after Biko’s death. This was not simply an ideological conflict. As emerged at the TRC, these battles were to a large degree fomented by the security forces as part of a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy, intended to sow suspicion and mistrust between organisations.84 Much of this conflict in Port Elizabeth emanated from a running feud between youth who claimed loyalty to the AZAPO-aligned Reverend Mzwandile Maqina, and those who claimed loyalty to the Charterist youth movements, COSAS, PEYCO and the Amabutho. This feud, which provided the impetus for the formation of early Amabutho structures as a defensive measure to protect the homes of UDF leaders, was particularly intense in Soweto-onSea, Kwazakele, and Walmer Township. Gibbs quotes an informant who recalls that: These groupings would move at night, which time they would see as the ideal time for the attack on whoever is targeted. We would be woken up early in the morning. We armed ourselves with all sorts of weapons. And at that time the idea was that let’s go to Maqina and let’s just attack these guys just once and for all. But what was interesting was that as we were approaching that place, the SADF military vehicle was actually protecting Maqina’s house, the house where most of these guys were residing.85

In the TRC report on the UDF–AZAPO conflict in Port Elizabeth, it was found that this ongoing battle had led to a large number of attacks, rendering many families homeless. One clash in June 1985 involved six hundred to a thousand UDF and AZAPO supporters, killing two. Most attacks involved petrol bombs, knives, axes and similar weaponry; some guns were used, and one MK attack on Maqina involved hand grenades. There were also allegations by both sides of ‘third force’ involvement in the conflict.86

Narratives of violence Accounts of the period confirm that the strikes and boycotts of the mid-1980s were extremely effective in terms of raising morale and achieving a sense of unity. In Port Elizabeth, consumer boycotts fostered a sense of possibility, a reclaiming of power in the face of

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an increasingly oppressive state. The campaign for ungovernability had a high human cost, but was very successful in that security forces did, in fact, lose control of parts of the city’s townships in 1986, as some of the former security police testified to the TRC’s Amnesty Committee in 1997.87 The Amabutho continued to operate through 1986 and the States of Emergency, in which, to a large degree, state security forces had wrested back control of the Port Elizabeth townships. By 1989, however, the tide had begun to shift: the ANC and SACP were unbanned in 1990 and political prisoners and leadership were released, some after decades in prison. MK officially suspended the armed struggle in August 1990 and the Amabutho ceased operating at around the same time.88 When discussing their histories, Amabutho members speak with pride about their contribution to the struggle and their heavy personal sacrifices. There is a strong sense of anger and disillusionment that this contribution is not recognised. At the same time, this is a painful and ambivalent history. The Amabutho’s story does not fit comfortably into the triumphant, nation-building narrative that has characterised so much of South African public history since the 1990s, particularly in comparison with the construction of memory of the 1976 uprisings. The Amabutho, however, insistently resist the forgetting of this history in a situation where the past remains a vital part of collective and personal identity. What are the possible means of incorporating such histories of violence into a public memory of this era? Violence was both perpetrated by and inflicted on the Amabutho. Even during the 1980s, the support of the leadership for the use of politically motivated violence was ambivalent at best, as the UDF could not be seen to be outrightly endorsing it. Nonetheless, as is apparent from Oliver Tambo’s speech cited earlier in the chapter, ‘the youth’ were recognised as central to the work of the liberation movements at home. Seekings notes that the Eastern Cape and Border UDF structures came the closest of any in the country to voicing support for violence as a legitimate tactic of struggle, in part via tacit support for the Amabutho. To quote the Eastern Cape UDF leader Stone Sizani, speaking at a funeral in Queenstown in late 1985: When one nation subjugates another the first thing they do is disarm them … they bring in their armed forces to kill and shoot us. They



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expect us to take it lying down … We say enough is enough. Now is the time to hit back. So that is why we say Amabutho must ever be strengthened, must ever be organised. They must be mobilised to hit more and most effectively.89

The Amabutho operated with the support of the street and area committees, which had developed into a strong and widespread organisational network by 1985. Escape routes were provided through residents’ houses and yards for comrades fleeing the police, access in some cases organised through the street committees. Thus, the Amabutho were acting in alliance with other organisations, suggesting that their actions were supported by the leadership, if only tacitly. The group saw itself as the ‘soldiers of inside’, with its own military structure, allied to other organisations but acting independently, carrying out the mission called for by the exiled ANC of making the townships ungovernable. This was carried out by whatever means were at the Amabutho’s disposal, using homemade weapons and a superior knowledge of the layout of the townships in which it operated. But the fact that Amabutho activists’ role as combatants is not recognised complicates the question of how the acts of violence perpetrated by Amabutho, both against police and soldiers, who were seen as enemy combatants, and against ­township residents who were seen to be supporting the enemy, is represented and legitimated today.90 Amabutho members themselves at times speak with ambivalence, skirting the edges of disclosure about such acts of violence. The leadership of the Soweto-on-Sea Amabutho, for instance, showed me a site called ‘Danger’, an abandoned building in an open field on the outskirts of the township. This was a site where people were executed, and the men who were showing me around the group’s important historical sites felt it was important that I see it and photograph it. However, they declined to speak about any specific events that occurred there. In January 2014, while I was working with some of the Amabutho generals to identify important sites on a map of Soweto and Veeplaas, ‘Danger’ was identified as a site that should be marked, but all that was said about it was, ‘That’s where some of our operations happened’. Besides the reluctance to discuss these events with an outsider, for many members the memories of witnessing and participating in

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acts of violence remain deeply traumatic, precluding the possibility of discussing them openly.91 At the same time, Amabutho members are very proud of their contribution to the struggle, and the use of targeted violence was an indispensable part of many campaigns, with a clear political goal in mind. Certainly, they do not share the ‘apocalyptic’ view of their organisation and actions. Rather, they describe their contributions as heroic, undertaken on the side of right in a just war: Amabutho actually, they have done the job of freeing this country, from the inside … Us, here inside: we were in the very hotpot. So what can I say, even the people who were in jail: there’s nothing they could have done in jail. The struggle was here, inside.92

The history of the Amabutho requires a confrontation with a collective history that is multifaceted, in some lights a history of liberation and the claiming of collective power, and in others a dark history, marked by brutality and violence, which remains embedded in the everyday spaces of the city and close to the surface of living memory today. This is perhaps, in part, why this history has not found traction in South African public history: it forces an opening up of a painful and ambiguous past that is extremely difficult to represent ‘truthfully’.

Performing Amabutho heritage At the time of his release in 1990, Nelson Mandela stated that, if the National Party government created the necessary conditions, the ANC and allied organisations would be successfully able to ‘appeal to the youth to discipline themselves, go back to school and concentrate on their studies’. But will the young lions be so easily tamed? … Many youth no doubt do have great expectations of a post-apartheid South Africa … [But] many youth will continue to be unemployed, regardless of the quality of their education … Any future government will, in short, face major social challenges.93

This was Seekings’ speculation in 1993, in the midst of the transitional period. And, indeed, for many of the Amabutho in the Eastern Cape, liberation brought its own challenges. By the time the p ­ olitical reforms of the 1990s were underway, many of

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the  Amabutho who had abandoned their schooling to join the movement found themselves with few opportunities for education or employment. The 1996 Special Pensions Act allows for state financial support to individuals who ‘made sacrifices or served the public interest in the cause of establishing a democratic constitutional order’.94 For the most part Amabutho members have fallen through the legislative cracks, unable to meet the special pension criteria. ­ Applicants must prove that for a minimum of five years before February 1990, they were either working full-time for a political ­organisation, were under banning orders or were imprisoned for political offences. Few Amabutho members are able to meet the burden of proof of five years of full-time commitment, since the Amabutho was not a formal ‘arm’ of any political movement, and there are no records of its membership. Military pensions are available to those who participated in the armed liberation wings such as MK, but are also unavailable to the Amabutho as it was not a formal armed group. Many Amabutho members express a sense of betrayal by the ANC. Recurring narratives are those of having been ‘forgotten’, complaints about being ‘left out’ of new structures of power, and the sense that after the sacrifices made in the name of the ANC and the liberation struggle, the group’s members remain marginalised. In a group discussion with Amabutho in April 2012, for example, it was raised that: In South Africa they recognise only comrades who were on Robben Island, some few MK. Any rally of ANC, they’ll be the guest ­speakers  … Amabutho are not recognised, they are not. But when there is a crisis in the ANC, there will be a call to the Amabutho. There is no call to the youth, to the MK. So we find out now, we are the pawns, they play chess with us. You understand? We are the instruments … The apartheid system is carrying hundreds of issues we were fighting for. The issue that makes us now to suffer, is because we were fighting capitalism … And also racism from the government. But now what is happening, I want to make clear to you … there were people that were carrying a pen. Without fighting. They were not there in that struggle, just with a pen, they write everything. But they are in power now … That is why today we are suffering, because capitalism

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is still there … You can die hungry. This transition, I’m sure it’s the third transition that we are fighting.95

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The Amabutho reconvened as an organisation in 2007, chaired by Mzwandile Mgubase, who recalls: Since 2007 we try to organise ourselves; to collect our different stories, to make one; to produce the petitions; to march in 2008; to make T-shirts for Amabutho; to fight for recognition; to go to Kwazakele to remember our comrades who have fallen on the way; to plant trees for June 16 at Kwazakele. We try to remember our activities just like that.96

As described by Mgubase, the Amabutho used various strategies to render the group and its histories publicly visible. Early activities included a tree-planting ceremony honouring the memory of 16 June at Kwazakele High, and a march to the City Hall in 2008. Mgubase describes the aims of these actions: In 2008, we went to Kwazakhele High, where the [1976] riot started. We went there to plant trees … We planted the trees to make a remembrance of those people who died for this liberation. Today we forgot about them: Why, ANC? Their graveyard today, the sheep and the goats deliver their babies there. There’s no one taking care of it … ANC doesn’t remember where we come from, ANC doesn’t remember the comrades who died.97

The graveyard to which Mgubase refers is Veeplaas cemetery, where he took me in March 2013. As he says, the cemetery is poorly maintained, the grass is unmown and livestock roam through the open space. On this visit, Mgubase suggests that the cemetery should contain a monument, ‘lit up at night so that everyone can see it, even from far away’, in memory of those who were killed in the conflicts of the 1980s.98 While there are monuments to some individuals who died in the conflicts and under the state repression of the 1980s, these sites are silent on the history of the Amabutho. In April 2012, I visited the Cradock Four Memorial at Coega Vulindlela village, with Mgubase, Mbuyiseli Jam and Janet Cherry. The memorial, normally empty and static, sparked memories of attending the funeral of the Cradock Four. Jam, a karate practitioner and teacher, recalls

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Politics of recognition 199

that in the early 1980s he occasionally taught karate classes in Matthew Goniwe’s classroom in Cradock. On the same visit, we stopped at Zwide Cemetery, where Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba are buried. Close to their gravesites is a memorial stone for the COSAS Two and the PEBCO Three, killed in 1981, 1982 and 1985. For many Port Elizabeth youth who were active in the 1980s, these five men – Topsy Madaka, Simphiwo Mtimkulu, Champion Galela, Sipho Hashe and Qaqawuli Godolozi – were close comrades and are still well remembered as the leadership of the youth movements of the period. When their remains were brought to Port Elizabeth from Post Chalmers in 2009, Amabutho members were present at the reburial ceremony to pay respects, in T-shirts made for the occasion. The third public memorial in Nelson Mandela Bay related to the 1980s is the Langa Memorial in Uitenhage, the site where I first met the Amabutho in March 2012. This memorial carries a direct connection to the Amabutho, as the mourners killed on 21 March 1985 were on their way to the funeral of eight Amabutho comrades who had died the week before. Like the gravesites and the Cradock Four Memorial, the Langa Memorial has an air of abandonment. It opened in 2010, and while it is used for yearly commemoration of the Langa Massacre, it has recently been badly vandalised. These monuments are the only sites in the city which offer official acknowledgement of a history to which the Amabutho are connected, but there is no representation in Nelson Mandela Bay’s memorial landscape of Amabutho members themselves. In the interactions described here, the monuments sparked small rituals of remembering by individuals with personal connections to these histories. This suggests that some form of concrete evidence of official acknowledgement of these pasts is important and desired, even if there are fundamental inadequacies in the ways these memorials have been realised. In terms of public memory related to the Amabutho, the existing memorials focus on those who are easily classified as ‘martyrs’ of the struggle, reflecting narratives that are already well known and acknowledged in the South African public and political sphere. While there are no memorial sites to the 1976 uprisings in Port Elizabeth, this history has been well integrated into tourist and heritage trails in Soweto, Johannesburg, including a heritage

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trail incorporating Morris Isaacson High School, the route taken by protesting pupils, the site of Hector Pieterson’s death and the Hector Pieterson Museum. Central to this trail and the museum is the commemoration of the dead: the first image encountered at the Hector Pieterson Museum is Sam Nzima’s famous photograph of Mbuyisa Makhubu carrying Hector’s body, alongside a symbolic gravestone erected by the ANC Youth League in 1992. The practice of inscribing the names of the dead is a common trope. At the Hector Pieterson Museum, bricks in the courtyard are marked with the names of the children who were killed, and at the Langa Memorial, paving stones have been laid in one of the sections of the memorial pathway through the park inscribed with the names of those killed by police. The Cradock Four Memorial, similarly, functions as a symbolic gravestone, including the use of dark funereal granite. If one of the functions of memorials is to lay memories to rest, the memory of the Amabutho resists this type of consignment to the past. The histories of the 1980s remain central to the ­identities of Amabutho members, and also represent a traumatic blot on the landscape of memory which continues to reverberate into the present. If the work of the memorial is to draw a clear line under the past and to contain it with a physical structure, the nature of memory of the Amabutho resists this kind of containment, or categorisation as ‘past’. Heidi Grunebaum has written on the role of the TRC in constructing and delineating this artificially neat division between past and future, in which the TRC process functioned as a ‘bridge’ between these two temporalities.99 This framework is presented by Desmond Tutu in his foreword to the first volume of the TRC report, where he suggests that if it is not faced, the past ‘refuses to lie down quietly. It has an uncanny habit of returning to haunt one’.100 Yet, Tutu explains that the purpose of bringing the past into the open is to enable it to be left behind: Having looked the beast of the past in the eye, having asked and received forgiveness and having made amends, let us shut the door on the past – not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it to imprison us. Let us move into the glorious future of a new kind of society.101

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Grunebaum, however, argues that the relationship between past and present fostered by the TRC functions as a ‘social structure of denial’.102 This denial is necessarily artificial, as the past remains with us, haunting and shaping the present. Grunebaum makes the case that in the TRC framework described by Tutu, certain memories have been excluded from ‘reconciliatory’ and ‘nation-building’ modes of production of public memory, and these need to be recovered by alternative means. In contrast to memorialisation reliant on bricks-and-mortar structures as ‘containers’ for memory, the Amabutho’s acts and rituals of memory are performative and invoke the past through action. The carrying of the Amabutho banner is an act through which history is made visible, placed into public space through movement and physical presence, which symbolically inscribes memory into the city’s public spaces. When the Amabutho banner appears in public space at events such as the Human Rights Day rally in Langa, it becomes an integral part of a performance of collective identity which includes  the toyi-toyi and the singing of struggle songs. Carried through the streets, the banner works to inscribe the  Amabutho’s iconography, physical presence and history temporarily into public space, making visible a layer of history which is not usually acknowledged in public discourses of memory. The banner has been used in this way at, for example, the launch of the fourth volume of the South African Democracy Education Trust’s The Road to Democracy in South Africa series, which included a chapter by Janet Cherry on the underground movement in the Eastern Cape. The banner was carried through the streets of New Brighton to the Red Location Museum where the launch was taking place, occupying the streets en route as well as the space in front of the museum on arrival.103 It was similarly carried around the streets of North End in central Port Elizabeth while Nelson Mandela’s memorial service was taking place in the football stadium in December 2013. The banner is also used to claim space temporarily for meetings or events, often hung on whatever wall is available at Amabutho meetings and workshops. The use of struggle songs and the toyi-toyi is an integral part of the way the banner positions the Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho in public space. One reading of the songs used by the Amabutho is as an oral record of struggle. Janet Cherry has traced the evolution

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of struggle songs in the Eastern Cape from the Congress revival period of the early 1980s, in which older songs from the campaigns of the 1950s were revived, through to new songs that emerged in the 1984–1989 period.104 These songs are not simply performances, but function as powerful elements of an ongoing struggle for recognition, reflecting the historical use of the songs as weapons of struggle and solidarity and invoking those histories. As containers of memory, the Amabutho’s songs underscore the extent to which the line between past and present is more porous than is often acknowledged in monumental forms of public history. For example, a number of the Amabutho meetings and workshops which I attended during 2012–2014 opened with the song ‘Mandela Mandela’, not a song unique to the Amabutho but one sung across the country in the 1980s: Mandela Mandela Freedom is in your hands Show us the way to freedom In this land of Africa Mandela said freedom now Let us stay away from slavery In our land of Africa

Swilling notes that the song was sung at the funeral of the MK operative Thandoxolo Mbete, killed in Port Elizabeth in March 1986.105 The songs of the past continue to be used in the present, in this case as part of the ritual of opening and closing meetings, acting as a marker of historical continuity. ‘Mandela Mandela’ also hearkens back to the leadership of the past: one reading of this song’s continued use is as an invocation of Mandela to deliver the Amabutho from its current struggles. Songs were transmitted in a number of ways, including via Radio Freedom. Many songs originated in MK training camps in Angola and elsewhere.106 Amabutho members explain that songs were also often composed collectively. For example, in a group discussion where Amabutho members were telling the story of the attack on Thamsanqa Linda’s house, one of the participants began to sing: Kwela phezu kwe’ndlu kaLinda uMam’uyajabula masishayi’ibhulu Jabula mama, jabula masishay’ibhulu107



Politics of recognition 203 (Climb on the roof of Linda’s house Mother celebrates when we defeat a boer Rejoice, mama, rejoice when we defeat the boer)

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Others in the room joined in, with much laughter. When I asked about the song’s origins, it was explained that: We were singing because we were so happy, we were chasing him away. [Laughter.] Singing is our medicine. No matter, make us angry, but if we sit down, we sing … Let’s say we go to the Linda house and just catch him, and we burn down the house, then we were so happy … and then we did that song. Ma Mavela must get her song, it’s rejoicing, because we won.108

The song has gained an additional political context in the present; Cherry notes that it is still used during moments of popular protest today, with Linda’s name replaced by that of a current disliked or unpopular local political leader.109 Mzwandile Mgubase recalls that part of the role of songs, historically and in the present, is to foster a sense of unity or of collective identity: The reason we were singing the songs, those songs we were singing were very meaningful … when we’re singing, they try to collect all the people together. No matter, you are not a student: as long as you hear that song you’re going to join. Because something is attached. The songs are very important in politics: the song is the thing that attaches the people, to come and join the wheel of politics.110

What does it mean to sing these liberation songs in the present – many of them originating from MK camps in Angola and ­elsewhere,  travelling via the illegal airwaves of Radio Freedom and  via those covertly crossing the borders, others originating spontaneously in the midst of the urban struggles of the 1980s, still others passed down or revived from the mass campaigns of the 1950s? Besides cementing a strong sense of group identity, ­belonging and visibility, the songs evoke past identities as young combatants, with a commensurate sense of power and the possibility of radical change. Liz Gunner argues that songs and performances from ‘the belly of the struggle’ such as these have the ‘ability to collapse time’.111 Writing on the song ‘Umshini wam’ and its close connection with memories of MK training camps,

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Gunner considers the layers of historical memory evoked by the use of liberation songs: The song … broke into popular public memory by recalling an earlier and more dangerous way of being. It evoked the years of pre-1994 resistance to the apartheid regime, the tense urban gatherings and mass funerals. It forced back into public imagination memories and stories of the long marches through the bush, lost family members, and the camps to the north in the countries which had hosted the freedom fighters … Song was a means of capturing and giving expression to the aspirations, the anxieties and the vision of people in that particularly turbulent and painful moment in South Africa’s history.112

The performative memory of the Amabutho thus serves a range of memorial purposes. The songs, the toyi-toyi and the banner are unifying forces, cementing collective identity and shared history. They evoke memories of a time period in which a great deal of the contemporary identity of the Amabutho is invested. The physicality of the performance of these songs and their use as tools to occupy public and social space echoes their use in the 1980s (and earlier) as tools of resistance and the claiming of agency. In this sense, the Amabutho’s songs function as a performance of identity, as a form of oral literature and as ‘a domain in which individuals … articulate a commentary about power relations in society and indeed create knowledge about society’.113

Spaces for memory: The Amabutho and memorial cartographies The townships of New Brighton, Kwazakele, Zwide, Veeplaas and Soweto-on-Sea are replete with unrecognised sites of memory. While carrying the banner through the city’s streets is a c­ onfrontational act of claiming visibility, the act of visiting these sites is very different. These are quiet, ordinary sites of everyday life that belie the often brutal and traumatic histories which unfolded there. In May 2013, three Amabutho members who had been active  in the Kiwane base, in Soweto-on-Sea, took me on a tour of sites  that  were particularly important to Amabutho history.114

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‘Soweto’ – a toponymic link to Johannesburg’s historic ­township – was a hotspot of struggle, centre of some of the heaviest Amabutho activity and one of the few areas where the security police lost control of the township in 1986. Kiwane was considered the Amabutho headquarters, where the uKongolo meetings would take place and from which plans and orders would be disseminated to the other bases. For the most part, the Amabutho bases and meeting points which I was shown were houses, shacks, or in some cases empty plots where outside rooms or shacks used to stand. Although the landscape has changed dramatically as the housing stock has been upgraded and shacks have been replaced or moved, the Amabutho members recall the precise location of each of the old bases, in an embodied process reminiscent of Yusuf Agherdien’s walks of memory through South End. In one spot, meetings were held under a large tree, known as ‘RR’ base. Here, one comrade would be posted in the tree to keep lookout, and the group could quickly disperse if the police arrived unexpectedly: Mbuyiseli Jam: If you can remember comrades, comrades were sitting here – you know these trees, there’s someone who’s sitting there up there in the tree. So if there’s something – Vuyisile Kibi: They can check the police all over. MJ: … The comrades planned that base for that. So if they stayed there, if the system disperses us it is easier here, if you can see here there’s a passage here, I think there’s a passage somewhere here, there’s a [way out] there … So it was easy for the comrades to disperse if there is something.115

Many such stories indicate the extent to which the Amabutho’s intimate knowledge of the township’s layout gave members an advantage over the police, who were generally unfamiliar with the terrain. More importantly, in the way they are remembered and retold, they become stories of ownership over the urban landscape, and the Amabutho become the protectors of that landscape, able to move deftly and secretly from place to place. The densely packed urban landscape also meant that there were certain parts of the township, particularly in the informal settlements of Soweto-onSea, Veeplaas and Red Location, where police vehicles could not follow. To illustrate this, the Soweto Amabutho members indicate

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the main road coming into Soweto, Bafana Road, and explain that lookouts placed at strategic points could raise the alarm when police were approaching, allowing people to disappear into backyards and houses. When chases on foot did occur, the Amabutho had a number of escape routes, which are also pointed out on this tour. Particularly memorable is a route through the underground storm drains. If one was being chased, one could lift up the heavy concrete covers and vanish underground, seemingly disappearing into thin air. The storm drain route ended in a marshy piece of open land to the east, bordering on Kwazakele (figure 41).116 In late 2013 and early 2014, as an experimental attempt to document and archive some of the Amabutho’s spatial histories, I worked with a group of Soweto-on-Sea Amabutho to produce a digital map of some of these sites, overlaid with sound clips of stories they had shared about those places and photographs. The process of identifying and marking sites allowed the emergence  of new narratives and memories which had not come out of one-on-one interviews,

Figure 41  Mbuyiseli Jam, Xolani Kota and Miki Qakamfanyane at the exit of the storm drain which was used as an escape route in ­ Soweto-on-Sea.

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Politics of recognition 207

Figure 42  Locating spaces of memory on a map of Soweto-on-Sea and Veeplaas.

including the recollection of comrades hiding in the tree at RR base (figure 42). Even as an experimental work in progress, the process revealed the density of Amabutho bases and other sites, and the complex interconnection of landscape and memory. Writing on the concept of ‘memorial topographies’, Grunebaum argues: The routes and networks of emplaced narratives that constellate spatial and temporal relations act as topographical mnemonics, inscribing ‘permitted’ modes of spatialised remembrances. Memorial cartographies produce historical meaning in cognitive and visceral ways in processes of historical visibilisation and social occlusion which seem to mirror those produced by other institutions of transition management, such as the TRC. For as memorial cartographies map human experience into sets of spatial and temporal ‘objects’ they constellate these sets into relations of perceptual and cognitive visibility.117

Much as the Amabutho’s narratives of history exist on the fringes of public memorial space, so do the spaces where these histories play out. In the absence of recognition, the Amabutho’s practices and

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spaces of memory exist only insofar as the group is able to insist on its own visibility. Physically and symbolically, there is little ‘permitted’ space for these histories in contemporary South African public culture. Yet, on these physical and virtual tours through Soweto and Veeplaas, it is clear that the Amabutho members, like those engaging with spatial memories of South End, see a second landscape of memory overlaid with the contemporary city. Ordinary spaces  – drain covers, residential streets, open fields, a patch of grass – become laden with emotive quality and remembered narrative. The Amabutho’s spaces of memory are comparable with another ‘memorial cartography’ project in Cape Town, the Western Cape Action Tours (WECAT). WECAT was run by a group of former MK combatants, locating sites of personal and collective memory that fell outside the ‘official’ tourist trail in Cape Town, establishing the city’s townships and the Cape Flats as sites of memory and narrative occluded from the city’s tourist imaginary.118 Unlike those of the Amabutho, former MK members are recognised as combatants. However, the sites of memory in Athlone and the other parts of the Cape Flats where WECAT operated are, like the sites in Veeplaas, Soweto-on-Sea and elsewhere in Nelson Mandela Bay, largely unmarked and unrecognised. Chubb and Van Dijk note, for example, that at the site of the Trojan Horse Massacre, in which three young protesters were killed by police in October  1985, ‘someone has sprayed the names of the murdered children on a garden wall, a gesture which conveys not only mourning but also anger at the way this spot is unmarked in any officially recognised way’.119 The occlusion of violent memory, and of the participation of young people in that history, is not endemic to the Eastern Cape but affects many spaces where these histories fall outside of the kinds of imaginaries that are easily packaged for tourism. Urban landscapes of trauma and violence such as these speak to the difficulty of setting apart sites for memory in a space where the urban landscape, or the shape of the city itself, is drenched in memory. As the density of sites identified and mapped by the Amabutho suggests, memory is inescapably entangled with everyday life. At the same time, access to the memories of the turbulence of the 1980s and the links of sites in the landscape to that memory is absolutely dependent on narrative. The power and the



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poignancy of these sites is their everydayness, their invisibility and their lack of a spectacular theatrics of memory.

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Conclusion: ‘The struggle still continues’ The struggle – to us – still continues. Because now what our struggle is, is a struggle of hunger. That is why comrades always say, this information is important for us … today, we stay hungry, but we have full information of the struggle.120

Perhaps more than any of the other case studies in this book, the story of the Amabutho reveals both the complexity of public memory in Nelson Mandela Bay and the extent to which issues of heritage and public memory are not simply academic or theoretical questions. The case of the Amabutho is deeply enmeshed with politics of recognition and access to resources, and questions of whose voice is heard in the post-apartheid memorial landscape and whose is not. On a pragmatic level, for the Amabutho the issue of recognition is a material issue, in the sense that public recognition of the group’s history and contribution is the first necessary step towards mitigating the destitution in which many of its members find themselves today. The Amabutho’s history also requires a complication of prevailing views of ‘struggle’ narratives. The Amabutho members see themselves as soldiers and are very proud of this history. Their actions successfully undercut the apartheid state’s ability to maintain control over the city’s townships in the 1980s. Yet, in doing so, a great deal of violence and brutality was inflicted, both by the Amabutho and perpetrated against its members. Many still carry residual trauma as a result of detention, torture and violence. This is not a history which fits easily into a simple linear narrative of oppression, struggle and heroic triumph, as indicated by members’ own statements that ‘our struggle still continues’, and it does not lend itself to easy casting of the roles of victim, hero or perpetrator. A number of pertinent questions are raised via the Amabutho’s experiences and the various strategies that have been used to record and disseminate these experiences. One of these questions is the issue of dealing with memories of violence which remain

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raw, both for the Amabutho and for those who were caught up in the violence of this period. As an example, the Amabutho banner forces a confrontation with a militant history that is not generally acknowledged in public space. Within this history, the use of violence and the enforcing of social control and compliance were seen as necessary elements in the successful waging of a war against an oppressive state that had to be defeated at all cost. However, this raises the question of what effect the carrying of the banner through public space, and the militant and confrontational presence of the Amabutho within that public space, might have on those who may have lost loved ones in the turbulence of the 1980s uprisings or who may carry residual trauma of their own. What space is there for this kind of memory in the city’s contemporary public spaces, particularly where the traumatic after-effects of this history have, for the most part, remained unresolved? For the Amabutho, it is seen as important to develop a record and an archive of this history. Some work has been done in this regard, largely through the group’s involvement in a project located at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, called the Legacies of Apartheid Wars Project (LAWS). Led by Theresa Edlmann as part of her doctoral work and supported by Janet Cherry, the LAWS project sought to work with people who had engaged in armed conflict under apartheid. This included those who had taken up arms on behalf of the apartheid state and those who resisted it. Under this project, Amabutho members held several oral history and storytelling workshops, constructed detailed timelines of their actions, recorded a CD of struggle songs, and worked with a young German filmmaker to produce a documentary about their history (figure 43). They also connected with other activists and people they may never otherwise have encountered, including former South African National Defence Force (SANDF) soldiers who would have been sworn enemies a few decades ago. Some of this work was presented publicly by Amabutho leadership at Think! Fest 2013, a research festival in Grahamstown linked to the annual National Arts Festival. At the same time, Janet Cherry worked closely with the group to set up a business cooperative to try to garner some collective income. These processes of recording and dissemination are viewed as a valuable form of recognition and public acknowledgement. However, by the end of 2013 there was a growing frustration

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Figure 43  Oral history workshop with the Legacies of Apartheid Wars Project.

among the group that, while this historical material was being generated, and there had been many opportunities via the LAWS workshops to discuss and record the group’s experiences and memories, the business cooperative had not taken off as hoped, and there seemed to be no clear way to parlay this history or the growing archive of knowledge into economic support or development, which is an urgent and longstanding material and psychological need. Although recording history is seen as important, this is not an adequate exercise on its own.121 Like the South End case, representation of Amabutho heritage is intrinsically embedded in the physical spaces of the city. Through militant performances of memory, the Amabutho claim public spaces from which this memory has been occluded. By embodying songs of struggle and memory in a contemporary urban landscape, and by insisting on the visibility of the iconographies of struggle, the Amabutho inscribe this heritage into spaces from which it has been excluded: the city centre, the state memorial, the ANC rally, the award-winning municipal museum’s front door. These histories are also embedded in the everyday urban spaces where they played out, which today bear little evidence of the dramatic histories which

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unfolded in the alleyways, streets and backyards of Nelson Mandela Bay’s townships during the 1980s. These spaces are unmarked and unacknowledged except by the narratives of the Amabutho members themselves. Through these narratives, spaces as banal as a drain cover, a tree or a dusty alleyway are reinterpreted as spaces of conflict, spaces of trauma, or spaces where a well-equipped state army could be outwitted by young men with homemade weapons and a deep knowledge of that landscape. As the walks I took through these spaces with the Amabutho and subsequent attempts to map some of these sites show, these places are physically and metaphorically distant from the city’s heritage routes, including the positioning of Red Location as a site of ­struggle-related heritage tourism. There is no award-winning memorial architecture here, no heroic monuments, no glossy ­brochures in the tourism office; all there is, for the most part, is an ordinary street corner and a story.

Notes   1 There were also groups called Amabutho made up of Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) supporters in KwaZulu-Natal in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period of intense conflict between ANC and IFP supporters. The KwaZulu-Natal Amabutho groups should not be confused with the Eastern Cape Amabutho of the mid-1980s, who were ANC/UDF supporters and ceased operating in around 1989.  2 Janet Cherry, ‘Dilemmas of Acknowledgement: Reclaiming the Amabutho’s Place in the Struggle and in Society’, paper presented at the conference ‘Addressing, Archiving and Accounting for Legacies of the Apartheid Wars in Southern Africa’, 5–6 July 2013 (Legacies of Apartheid Wars project, Rhodes University).   3 Mark Swilling and Tom Lodge, ‘The Year of the Amabuthu’, Africa Report 31, no. 2 (1986): 4–7.   4 Janet Cherry, ‘Hidden Histories of the Eastern Cape Underground’, in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, vol. 4, pt 1, ed. SADET (Pretoria: Unisa, 2010), 361–438; Janet Cherry, Umkhonto WeSizwe: A Jacana Pocket History (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2011).  5 Mark Swilling, ‘Urban Control and Changing Forms of Political Conflict in Uitenhage, 1977–1986’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 1994).

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  6 Jeremy Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983–1991 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000); Ineke Van Kessel, ‘Beyond Our Wildest Dreams’: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).   7 Monique Marks, Young Warriors: Youth Politics, Identity and Violence in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2001).   8 Cherry, ‘Politics of Transition’.   9 Rory Riordan, ‘Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage – Township Revolt and Political Development, 1976–1990’, paper presented at the conference ‘Port Elizabeth’s Place in South African History and Historiography’, Vista University Port Elizabeth Campus, 24–25 September 1992. 10 Andile Kondlo, interviewed by Naomi Roux, 3 April 2013. 11 Cherry and Gibbs, ‘Liberation Struggle’. 12 Gail Gerhart and Clive Glaser, From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1990, vol. 6, Challenge and Victory, 1980–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Cherry and Gibbs, ‘Liberation Struggle’. 13 M. Marks, Young Warriors. 14 Cherry and Gibbs, ‘Liberation Struggle’, 609. 15 Nokuthula Mazibuko, Spring Offensive: Youth Underground Structures in South Africa during the 80s, ed. Pumla Dineo Gqola (Limpopo: Timbila, 2006), 14–16. 16 Biks Ndoni, quoted in Cherry and Gibbs, ‘Liberation Struggle’, 609. 17 Mncedisi Sitoto, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Uitenhage, 28 March 2012. Sitoto is the chairperson of a community development organisation called the Uitenhage Development Forum. 18 Cherry, ‘Politics of Transition’; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Report, vol. 2 (Cape Town, 1998). 19 Mark J. Kaplan, Between Joyce and Remembrance (Oley, PA: Bullfrog Films, 2004). 20 Gerhart and Glaser, From Protest to Challenge. 21 Gerhart and Glaser, 59–60. 22 Jeremy Seekings, Heroes or Villains? Youth Politics in the 1980s (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1993). 23 Gerhart and Glaser, From Protest to Challenge, 60. 24 Bernard Magubane, ‘The Crisis of the Garrison State’, in SADET, Road to Democracy, 4 (1): 2. 25 Ruth Kerkham Simbao, ‘The Thirtieth Anniversary of the Soweto Uprisings: Reading the Shadow in Sam Nzima’s Iconic Photograph of Hector Pieterson’, African Arts 40, no. 2 (2007): 52–69.

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26 Ali Khangela Hlongwane, ‘Commemoration, Memory and Monuments in the Contested Language of Black Liberation: The South African Experience’, Journal of Pan African Studies 2, no. 4 (2008): 135–70; Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘I Saw a Nightmare …’ Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), www.gutenberg-e.org/poh landt-mccormick/index.html. 27 Colin Bundy, ‘Survival and Resistance: Township Organisations and Non-Violent Direct Action in Twentieth Century South Africa’, in From Comrades to Citizens: The South African Civics Movement and the Transition to Democracy, ed. Glenn Adler and Jonny Steinberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 26–51. 28 Adler and Steinberg, From Comrades to Citizens. 29 Carole Cooper and Linda Ensor, PEBCO: A Black Mass Movement (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1981). 30 Bundy, ‘Survival and Resistance’. 31 David Welsh, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2009). 32 Cooper and Ensor, PEBCO: A Black Mass Movement; Cherry, ‘Politics of Transition’. 33 Tom Lodge and Bill Nasson, All, Here and Now: Black Politics in South Africa in the 1980s (London: David Philip, 1991). 34 Seekings, UDF. 35 Lodge and Nasson, All, Here and Now. 36 Janet Cherry, ‘“We Were Not Afraid”: The Role of Women in the 1980s Township Uprising in the Eastern Cape’, in Women in South African History: Basus’iimbokodo, Bawel’imilambo/They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers, ed. Nomboniso Gasa (Cape Town: HSRC, 2007), 281–313. 37 Pregs Govender, ‘Briefing: Launching UDF Women’s Congress’, Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 1, no. 1 (1987): 75–78. 38 Cherry, ‘“We Were Not Afraid”’, 283. 39 Lodge and Nasson, All, Here and Now. 40 Lodge and Nasson, 71. 41 Lungewa Makina, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Red Location, 6 March 2013. 42 Cherry, ‘Hidden Histories’. 43 Kessel, ‘Beyond Our Wildest Dreams’, 17. 44 Seekings, UDF. 45 Kessel, ‘Beyond Our Wildest Dreams’. 46 Jeremy Seekings, ‘“Spooking PW”: Opposing the Tricameral Parliament, August 1983–September 1984’, in UDF, 91–119; Ineke

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Van Kessel, ‘The UDF and South Africa in the 1980s: The Events’, in ‘Beyond Our Wildest Dreams’, 15–48; Tom Lodge and Bill Nasson, ‘The UDF Revolt’, in All, Here and Now, 58–141. 47 Lodge and Nasson, All, Here and Now, 65. 48 Gerhart and Glaser, From Protest to Challenge; Tom Lodge, Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and Its Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). In this text Lodge provides an overview of the origins of the 1984 uprising in the Vaal and its subsequent spread through the region. 49 Cherry, ‘Hidden Histories’, 391. 50 Magubane, ‘Crisis of the Garrison State’. 51 Oliver Tambo, ‘Make South Africa Ungovernable’, Radio Freedom broadcast, 10 October 1984, www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4457. 52 Mzwandile Mgubase, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Kwazakele, 28 March 2013. 53 Gerhart and Glaser, From Protest to Challenge, 72. 54 ANC, ‘Statement of the National Executive Committee on the Occasion of the 73rd Anniversary of the ANC’, ANC, 1985, accessed 15 November 2018, www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=2631. 55 Seekings, Heroes or Villains? 56. 56 Swilling and Lodge, ‘Year of the Amabuthu’, 5. 57 Gerhart and Glaser, From Protest to Challenge, 100. 58 Mbuyiseli Jam, Xolani Kota and Henderson Jacobs, interviewed by Naomi Roux, Soweto-on-Sea, Port Elizabeth, 29 January 2014. 59 Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho: Siphiwo James, Philip Madaka, Nondyebo Mvomvo, Andile Kondlo, Goodman Puwani, Boy Mdluli and Mbuyiseli Jam, in discussion with Naomi Roux, Bolo Punch Hall, Kwazakele, Port Elizabeth, 11 April 2012. 60 Mbuyseli Jam, Xolani Kota and Henderson Jacobs, interviewed by Naomi Roux, 29 January 2014. 61 Former Amabutho generals: Vuyisile Kibi, Msebenzisi Fani, Xolani Kota and Mbuyiseli Jam, in discussion with Naomi Roux, Kiwane Base, Soweto-on-Sea, Port Elizabeth, 17 January 2014. 62 Mbuyiseli Jam, Xolani Kota and Henderson Jacobs, interviewed by Naomi Roux, 29 January 2014. 63 Mbuyiseli Jam, Xolani Kota and Henderson Jacobs, interviewed by Naomi Roux, 29 January 2014. 64 Former Amabutho generals, in discussion with Naomi Roux, 17 January 2014. Umrabulo are political education meetings. 65 Cherry, ‘Hidden Histories’, 391. 66 Derek Catsam, ‘“Those Who Command the Ones that Pulled the Trigger See Us as Less Than Human”: The Langa Massacre and

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State Violence in South Africa’, paper presented at the Spring 2000 Southeastern  Regional Seminar in African Studies (SERSAS) meeting,  14–15 April 2000 (Cullowee, NC: Western Carolina University, 2000). 67 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Report, vol. 6. 68 Cherry, ‘Hidden Histories’, 406. 69 Lodge and Nasson, All, Here and Now, 73. 70 Lodge and Nasson, 90. 71 Mbuyiseli Jam, Xolani Kota and Henderson Jacobs, interviewed by Naomi Roux, 29 January 2014. Skaftins are lunch boxes. 72 Lungelwa Makina, interviewed by Naomi Roux, 6 March 2013. 73 Lodge and Nasson, All, Here and Now, 80–81. 74 Cherry, ‘Politics of Transition’, 107. 75 Kwazakele (Syria Base) Amabutho, LAWS Oral History Workshop discussion, 26 March 2013, facilitated by Janet Cherry, translation by Msira Febana. 76 Kwazakele (Syria Base) Amabutho, LAWS Oral History Workshop discussion, 26 March 2013. 77 Kwazakele (Syria Base) Amabutho, LAWS Oral History Workshop discussion, 26 March 2013. 78 Mbuyiseli Jam, Xolani Kota and Miki Qakamfana, interviewed by Naomi Roux, 3 May 2013. 79 Necklacing is a method of execution in which a burning tyre soaked in petrol is placed over the victim’s shoulders. 80 Kessel, ‘Beyond Our Wildest Dreams’, 35. For a detailed account of the actions of Kinikini in Uitenhage, see Swilling, ‘Urban Control’. 81 Pat Gibbs, ‘Race and Ideology in Port Elizabeth: A View from the Northern Areas, 1979–1990’, in SADET, Road to Democracy, 4 (1): 439–91. 82 Kwazakele (Syria Base) Amabutho, LAWS Oral History Workshop discussion, 26 March 2013, facilitated by Janet Cherry, translation by Msira Febana. 83 Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho, in discussion with Naomi Roux, 11 April 2012. 84 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, ‘Resistance Grouping and Counter Mobilisation: UDF-AZAPO Clashes, Port Elizabeth 1985–1986’, chap. 2, subsection 20, in Report, vol. 3. 85 Gibbs, ‘Race and Ideology in Port Elizabeth’, 486. 86 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, ‘Resistance Grouping and Counter Mobilisation’. 87 Cherry, ‘Hidden Histories’, 415. 88 Cherry, 414.

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89 Quoted in Seekings, UDF, 159. This phrase, ‘enough is enough’, today appears on the Amabutho banner – underneath the logos of the three parties of the tripartite alliance. 90 Cherry, ‘Dilemmas of Acknowledgement’. 91 Former Amabutho generals, in discussion with Naomi Roux, 17 January 2014. 92 Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho, in discussion with Naomi Roux, 11 April 2012. 93 Seekings, Heroes or Villains? 101. 94 Special Pensions Act, 1996 (no. 69’ of 1996), G 17564, www.saflii. org/za/legis/num_act/spa1996182/. 95 Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho, in discussion with Naomi Roux, 11 April 2012. 96 Mzwandile Mgubase, interviewed by Naomi Roux, 28 March 2013. 97 Mzwandile Mgubase, interviewed by Naomi Roux, 28 March 2013. 98 Mzwandile Mgubase, interviewed by Naomi Roux (New Brighton and Kwazakele site visit), 28 February 2013. 99 Heidi Grunebaum, Memorialising the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011). 100 Desmond Tutu, ‘Chairperson’s Foreword’, in Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Report, vol. 1 (Cape Town, 1998), 7. 101 Tutu, 22. 102 Grunebaum, Memorialising the Past. The view of the TRC as ‘imposing’ a reconciliatory framework, which has also been argued for by Posel and Simpson and by Wilson, among others, has been contested by Madeleine Fullard and Nicky Rousseau on the grounds that this was not, in fact, the primary framing of the TRC’s purpose. In fact, the idea of the TRC was first mooted during the transitional negotiations in the early 1990s, as the ‘price’ to be exacted for the awarding of amnesty to perpetrators. Nonetheless, the way in which the TRC played out in public culture and via the media has, regardless of its original political intentions, strongly entangled the process with the language of ‘forgiveness’ and ‘reconciliation’ as the bedrocks of the new nation. See Madeleine Fullard and Nicky Rousseau, ‘Uncertain Borders: The TRC and the (Un) Making of Public Myths’, Kronos, no. 34 (2008): 215–39. 103 Cherry, ‘Dilemmas of Acknowledgement’. 104 Janet Cherry, ‘Emzabalazweni: Singing the Language of Struggle, Past and Present’, in Singing, Speaking and Writing Politics: South African Political Discourses, ed. Mirjana N. Dedaic (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 2015), 221–46.

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105 Mark Swilling, ‘Notes and Recordings of Funeral of ANC Guerrilla Thanduxolo Mbete, Uitenhage, March 14, 1986’, in Gerhart and Glaser, From Protest to Challenge, 422–29. 106 Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho, interviewed by Janet Cherry (recording session of Amabutho songs), St Stephen’s Church, New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, 24 November 2011, transcription and notes courtesy of Janet Cherry. 107 Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho, in discussion with Naomi Roux, 11 April 2012, transcription and translation provided by Cherry in ‘Emzabalazweni’, 234. 108 Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho, in discussion with Naomi Roux, 11 April 2012. On the same song and related songs directed against collaborators and councillors, Cherry notes that the name ‘Linda’ in this case could have been replaced with the name of any councillor, and the song would have been used at various times when perceived collaborators were under attack from Amabutho. Cherry, ‘Emzabalazweni’. 109 Cherry, ‘Emzabalazweni’. 110 Mzwandile Mgubase, in discussion with Naomi Roux and Andile Kondlo, at Mr Kondlo’s Home, Kwazakele, Port Elizabeth, 3 April 2013. 111 Liz Gunner, ‘Jacob Zuma, the Social Body and the Unruly Power of Song’, African Affairs 108, no. 430 (2008): 43. 112 Gunner, 38. 113 Liz Gunner and Graham Furniss, eds, Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1. 114 Mbuyseli Jam, Xolani Kota and Miki Qakamfana, interviewed by Naomi Roux (Soweto-on-Sea site visit), Port Elizabeth, 3 May 2013. For the purposes of this section of this chapter, the term ‘Soweto’ refers to Soweto-on-Sea in Port Elizabeth, not the Johannesburg township, unless otherwise indicated. 115 Former Amabutho generals, in discussion with Naomi Roux, 17 January 2014. 116 Mbuyiseli Jam, Xolani Kota and Miki Qakamfana, interviewed by Naomi Roux, 3 May 2013. 117 Grunebaum, Memorialising the Past. 118 Leslie Witz has discussed the politics of tourism and township space in Cape Town, demonstrating that urban tourism tends to establish the city as the space of ‘history’ and the township as the ahistoricised space of ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’. WECAT was, in this regard, an attempt to counter this kind of touristic framing of the Western Cape townships and to render these spaces visible as sites of historical memory and

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narrative. At the time that WECAT was operating, there were no museums in Cape Town’s townships; for the most part this remains the case, with the exception of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum in Lwandle/Strand, about 40 kilometres outside the Cape Town city centre. See Leslie Witz, ‘Museums on Cape Town’s Township Tours’, in Murray, Shepherd and Hall, Desire Lines, 259–75; Leslie Witz, ‘Revisualising Township Tourism in the Western Cape: The Migrant Labour Museum and the Re-construction of Lwandle’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 29, no. 4 (2011): 371–88. 119 Karin Chubb and Lutz Van Dijk, Between Anger and Hope: South Africa’s Youth and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2001), 193. This text dates from 2001; a memorial to the massacre was unveiled at the site in 2005. 120 Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho, in discussion with Naomi Roux, 11 April 2012. 121 Cherry, ‘Dilemmas of Acknowledgement’.

6

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Conclusion

The parenthetical age had dawned, the years of qualification and revision, when the old versions of things trailed behind the new ones in brackets, fading identities and spent meanings dogging the footsteps of the present like poor relations. Sometimes the ghosts went ahead suddenly, as if the sun had reeled to the wrong horizon in a moment and left you following your own shadow down the street.1

In September 2014, the Herald ran a front-page story about a man named Themba Adams, who had returned to reclaim his childhood home in Red Location. Adams had been jailed in 2008, and on his release in 2012 found that his neighbourhood had been demolished to make way for the new Red Location Art Gallery. He moved in with friends temporarily, but became homeless in 2014 and decided to move back into his now-empty family home. When he arrived, security guards stopped him from entering the house, which had been incorporated into the Red Location Cultural Precinct. The article was accompanied by an image of Adams sitting on the low concrete embankment surrounding the tidied-up and freshly painted cottage, a small rucksack next to him containing his possessions.2 The return and the turning away of Themba Adams from his former home, and the erasure of his remembered neighbourhood in the name of public memory, poignantly reflect the tensions between the work of memory and the work of urban transformation. Marked by the concrete plinth on which it is raised and the detailed signage explaining its historical significance, the red iron house is recast as a symbolic remnant of what once stood here. In this process, it has ceased to function as a house or a home. When he returned with his bag of belongings, Adams must have  been aware that it

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had been claimed as part of the museum. The act of attempting to reoccupy it was an act of resisting the house’s new signification as a site of history and a symbol of the past, from which Adams’ bodily ­presence had been erased. In this book, I have examined the negotiation and contestation of memory in Nelson Mandela Bay, revealing the slippages between ‘official’ projects of remaking the post-apartheid city and the desires, memories and needs of those who live there. At the beginning, I set out to address the questions of what is excluded or erased in the large-scale, state-driven projects of memory that have become ubiquitous in the South African heritage landscape, and how this erasure has been contested. What is at stake when memory becomes an anchor for large-scale projects of transformation, and how have spaces for occluded memory and unrecognised histories been claimed and inscribed into the city? Derek Hook, writing on post-apartheid social formations from a psychosocial perspective, suggests that the ‘spatial imaginary that has long served as a means of encapsulating the South African condition no longer suffices’.3 Rather, as Vladislavić represents the experience of the returning exile in the extract above, a metaphor of multiple temporalities may be a more accurate descriptor for the ways in which layers of history, memory and experience have sedimented in the spaces of everyday life. For Hook, this ‘post-­ apartheid temporality’ pulls in multiple directions: a hopeful narrative of a future which transcends the past and its ruinations, as well as the sense that things have not changed broadly or deeply enough, and the continual threat of regression. Certainly, the spatial on its own is an inadequate ‘container’ for the multiple, complex experiences and the continued echoes and legacies of apartheid and colonialism. The phrase ‘post-apartheid’ in this context is a problematic placeholder, eliding the slippages between past and present, whether these come in the form of stasis, inertia or entropy, or in the form of unexpected confrontations with the shadow of the past, as per Vladislavić’s metaphor. Nonetheless, the figure of the city, which has remained a central metaphor and site of enquiry for a great deal of work on South African memory, can be read – as I have done here – as a site where the multiple temporalities and articulations of past and present are thrown into high relief, where histories of traumatic dislocation unfold on ordinary

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street corners and where empty office blocks become screens for memories of systematised state brutality. Tom Lodge has sketched this evocative quality of seemingly ordinary urban spaces in the closing passage of his book on Sharpeville in South African history and memory, describing a reservoir lake on the outskirts of Sharpeville. The space is serene and ‘startlingly beautiful’, seemingly a perfect leisure space, but completely unused and deserted. This ‘strange abstention’ is explained by Sekwati Sekoana, curator of the memorial museum at the old police station where the 1960 Sharpeville massacre took place: After the shooting started it began to rain. The rain washed the blood away from the dead and wounded and the water drained away to flow into the reservoir at the township’s edge. The dam was often empty before that day but since then it has always been full … Nobody has used the water since. Nobody goes there. Never.4

The journey this book has taken through Nelson Mandela Bay’s sites of memory points towards the possibility for a performative, embodied public memory that plays out on the stage of the urban landscape, in which ‘official’ neglect is not commensurate with the absence of memory. As I have noted earlier, in the 1990s and 2000s there was a concerted programme on the part of both the state and smaller, ‘community’-driven organisations to support and develop new memorials, monuments and museums honouring the sacrifices and struggles of the past, acknowledging previously suppressed or erased histories, and establishing new mythologies and genealogies of the nation. These new spaces of memory served a number of purposes: ‘symbolic reparations’, spaces of acknowledgement and loci for grief, and the establishing of new iconographies and emblems for the reconciliatory ‘rainbow nation’ that dominated discourse about national identity under the Mandela presidency. During this period, a correspondingly large body of critique emerged interrogating these new nationalisms, ideas of belonging and of citizenship that were being produced by the new state, via memory sites, museums, memorials and other means. Questions posed at this time included those of what form the imaginaries of the new nation would take, how memory was being mobilised for political purposes, what was being occluded in the production of post-apartheid public memory, how memory and public culture

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were articulating ideas of the new nation and its narratives, and what the relationships were or could be between ‘academic’ history and emergent forms of public and popular history. A great deal of the existent work on memory and heritage in South Africa has focused on Cape Town and Johannesburg, where several new, spectacular projects of memory and urban remaking were concentrated in the 1990s and 2000s. In contrast, there has been little discussion of how public memory has been mobilised and contested in smaller cities and towns, particularly in those which do not occupy central spaces in the national imaginary. I have focused on Nelson Mandela Bay in the Eastern Cape as a site where particularly fraught contestations and conflicts have occurred regarding which histories are placed in public space, how and by who; what kind of benefits are perceived as flowing from these projects, which are also often framed as ‘urban development’ or ‘renewal’ projects; and the ways in which the inscription of public memory into the city’s spaces intersects with ongoing tensions around questions of political representation, democratic participation and the right to the city. These questions are particularly prescient in a space widely seen as the ‘home’ of the struggle and the ANC, and where the ANC has until recently routinely won local and provincial elections by a landslide (although Nelson Mandela Bay has always been somewhat more politically contested than the rest of the province). There have been attempts to market the Eastern Cape as a site of strugglerelated heritage tourism. Many of the state-driven sites of memory in Nelson Mandela Bay – the Red Location Museum and the use of the Mandela name among them – are also acts of claiming the city and the province as the home of struggle history, or, as a 2013 Eastern Cape Tourism campaign defined it, ‘The Home of Legends’. My intention has not been to revisit the same questions that were being asked of South African heritage and memory studies ten or fifteen years ago as the memorial landscape began to be rewritten, although my work draws on these earlier studies and insights. It is well established that the writing of post-transitional public histories has been a politicised project, and that in the process some narratives of history have receded into the background while others have become firmly established as the narratives of nationhood. In the case studies I have examined, this selective representation of

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historical narrative is apparent in, for example, the occlusion of the histories of Biko and of the traces of Black Consciousness history in the process of ‘renewing’ the inner city around the metaphor of Mandela’s biography; as well as in the lack of acknowledgement of the history of the Amabutho. In the case of several of the monumental projects discussed here – the failure of the Red Location Museum being the most dramatic example, but also the abandoned monumental spaces of Emlotheni, Langa and the Cradock Four – it is clear that although they may be opened with great ceremony and possibly used once a year for the commemoration of a national holiday, for the most part such sites do not function as active spaces of memory or memorial ritual. As these spaces remain empty or abandoned, are vandalised, or simply begin to fall into ruin, they become sites of entropy rather than sites of memory. As a result, these abandoned spaces of memory, replete with inscriptions of heroic poetry, the names of martyred heroes and political symbols, become markers for the ways in which the imaginaries of the new nation constructed during the 1990s have similarly been abandoned. Yet the memories and experiences of the apartheid period (and earlier) have not by any means disappeared because of the inadequacy or, in some cases, complete lack of formalised memorial spaces. At times, such as in the case of the Amabutho, this occlusion has led to a more militant insistence on the visibility of occluded histories in the city’s public spaces. The failures of monumental and architectural spaces for memory have resulted in the development of an extraordinary range of forms of heritage and memory-making outside of these spaces. These are often transgressive, sometimes connected with physical spaces, sites or buildings but more often located in the performative spaces of spoken narrative, conversation, or the iconography and embodiment of protest. The everyday and non-monumental forms of public memory which I have explored here are, in many cases, explicitly political acts, which claim public space and defiantly write a sense of history into the streets and spaces of the city. The contestations over public memory in Nelson Mandela Bay which I discuss here, then, can be read on one level as contestations of authorship. Returning to De Certeau’s conception of the city as a text with multiple authors, in what ways has this assertion of the right to

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authorship – which is linked to the right to shape and to claim the city and its public spaces – been expressed in the realm of memory? My starting point for this discussion has been the Red Location Museum of Struggle and the half-complete cultural precinct around the museum. More so than any other memory project in Nelson Mandela Bay, this site is entangled with notions of post-apartheid citizenship, belonging and memory-making as well as with the remaking of urban space. However, the form of urban transformation promised by the Red Location project has been vociferously and repeatedly rejected by residents, resulting in long delays in its construction and opening, and, more recently, the closure of the museum. Although the ‘authorship’ of this space officially belongs to architects, planners and designers, it is clear that residents have forcefully insisted on taking over authorship of this particular urban text. The Red Location case, however, is ambiguous, as residents have not rejected the idea of the museum. The conflict over the space, rather, is linked to the council’s priorities for development, which residents argue should lie with the rectification of the area’s housing situation. There is a great deal of anger and unhappiness over the use of land that once housed Red Location families, in some cases for generations, for buildings which have been poorly used. This has been expressed in particular in relation to the art gallery and library, where people were moved from their land to make room for buildings which then remained empty for several years. Yet, residents do view the museum as an asset, although not necessarily in the benign, unificatory way in which it was framed at its inception as a ‘community’ resource. It is seen as important to acknowledge the history of Red Location in some manner, and even residents at the forefront of the housing protests which shut the museum down in 2013 mention that it is important to have a place to take one’s children and grandchildren to talk about Red Location’s past. However, the museum is seen as belonging to the municipality, and as such is an asset that can be used by residents as leverage in protests and negotiations. The closure of the museum is a drastic statement of taking ownership, emerging in a space with long histories of activism and radicalism, through which residents are insisting on their position as authors of the ­neighbourhood’s future.

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In contrast to the Red Location Museum, the reinscription of the destroyed neighbourhood of South End into the city’s symbolic landscape has developed in a somewhat less directly conflictual form. In South End, the use of narrative, conversation and ritual has developed as means of commemorating and reconstructing the lost neighbourhood, which resists the monumental approach of Red Location. The two central forms of recording and transmitting memory or producing ‘heritage’ in the case of South End are via photography and the translation of the rituals of viewing family visual archives into the museum space; as well as the embodied rituals of moving through space, using narrative to translate the ruins scattered through the landscape of South End as an act of imaginative reconstruction and reclamation. The South End ruins resist identification as ‘monument’ or ‘memorial’. Where the last remnants of the old housing of Red Location have been re-signified as a symbol for the city’s project of overcoming the past, the South End ruins are relatively unmediated, appearing in the landscape without any marker or indication setting them apart from the everyday space of the city. The South End ruins are accessed through narratives and stories recounted by those who experienced the removals. In their current form they are recovered only imaginatively, as Yusuf Agherdien has done through the use of double photographic images which work to superimpose the lost landscape over its current state. These personal experiences, private archives and familial rituals occupy a very different type of memorial space in the city to the wholesale urban renovation promised by the Red Location Museum. The possibilities of a performative heritage which takes place in the absence of a monument or physical site of remembrance emerges strongly in the case of the Amabutho, whose occlusion from public memory is experienced as both a political issue of acknowledgement and as deeply traumatic. In the case of the Amabutho, there has been an almost complete exclusion from public history of a narrative which nonetheless remains deeply central to the identities of those who lived it. As in South End, the memories of the Amabutho are embedded in the ordinary spaces of the city, revealing the multiple layers of memory and meaning which make up the contemporary urban landscape and also suggesting some of the difficulties of adequately representing this history.

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In the context in which liberation history has been framed in South Africa, including in Nelson Mandela Bay (via, for example, the triumphalist framing of Mandela’s biography in the Route 67 project), the story of the Amabutho resists easy categorisation or representation. There is no escaping the fact that this history is a violent one, in terms of both violence perpetrated and violence suffered. The view the Amabutho members have of themselves may not always match up with that of people who were targeted for violent attacks by the group. Were they unrecognised soldiers of the liberation movement, or were they, as some have characterised them, bands of ill-disciplined, violent youth without a clear political programme? Were they victims, heroes, martyrs or perpetrators? What room is there in a triumphalist history of noble struggle for a complex, multifaceted narrative like this one? In this case, the Amabutho have taken the inscription of history into public space into their own hands. The Amabutho’s strategies for visibility have been highly performative, drawing on the use of old songs and the militant toyi-toyi, which frame the carrying of the Amabutho banner through the public spaces of the city. This is a different kind of claiming of memorial space to that which takes place during walks through remembered landscapes: it is militant, highly visible and intended to mark the Amabutho as an identifiable group, linked to the group’s campaign for recognition from the state for its contributions to the struggle. As has happened in a different way in Red Location, the Amabutho’s history is being mobilised as an asset in a campaign for acknowledgement. One of the threads in this text is a deep sense of disillusionment regarding the status quo twenty years after the legislative end of apartheid. This has been at the core of the rejection of the Red Location project by residents. It also emerges repeatedly in discussions with the Amabutho, many of whom feel deeply betrayed by the lack of recognition for the sacrifices they made, believing that they were fighting for a utopian, egalitarian future which has not come into being. The group’s claiming of public visibility is, therefore, also an act of claiming political space. It signifies a refusal to accept what is viewed as a betrayal by the leadership of the 1980s, including those who were at the forefront of PEYCO and other youth movements, many of whom have gone on to lucrative careers in politics or business. The Amabutho’s performative heritage, the

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act of carrying the banner and the songs of the 1980s through the streets and outside ‘official’ ANC commemorative rallies, is in this regard also a reminder that, for the Amabutho, the struggle is not complete and this is not a history which can simply be assigned to the past and forgotten. The presence of Amabutho history in the city, and the group’s insistence on the continued visibility of that history, stands in opposition to the function of static or built monuments as sites which place memory outside of the realm of everyday experience. The Amabutho continue to live within and identify with that history, resisting easy containment in the formalised spaces of memory. This entanglement of memory and contemporary politics emerges in the way that Mandela’s image has been used in the city’s reimagining and rebranding of itself. The imagery of Route 67 and the newly upgraded Donkin Reserve draw strongly on the ‘rainbow nation’ imagery of the mid-1990s, already appearing somewhat dated. In discussions with those who are claiming and mobilising around the memory of Biko and of the BCM, it emerges that this mobilisation of memory is one means of searching for political alternatives in a space dominated by ANC hegemony, both politically and in the arena of heritage. The way in which Biko’s image has been mobilised has been distinctly anti-monumental, and often accompanied with discourse around ‘legacy’ and ‘practice’ rather than national emblems, monuments or memorials. The notion of ‘legacy’ rather than ‘memorialisation’ also informed the approach of the Steve Biko Foundation and the new Steve Biko Centre in Ginsburg, for whom the implementation of development practice and the principle of ­self-determination are viewed as more central to the memorialisation of Biko than a monument or memorial could be. This, then, begins to open up the question of what alternatives exist for public memory, and what possibilities there are for the work of memory now, more than twenty years after the end of apartheid, at the end of over two decades of nation-building and memory-making, in a context where many people feel embittered and excluded from the promises and hopes of that new nationhood. It is by now orthodox in memory studies to consider the concept of ‘memory’ as entangled with ‘forgetting’. However, many of the case studies discussed here suggest that memory is s­urprisingly

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­ersistent. In the same way that the designation of spaces of p memory as such does not necessarily result in the emergence of practices of memory, official ‘forgetting’ has little effect on the practice and claiming of that memory. One of the problems that has arisen in the way public memory has been engaged in Red Location and elsewhere in the city has been the lack of recognition of those who live in the shadow of the new monuments as a ‘community of narrators and translators’.5 However, as many of the sites discussed in this book show, these ‘communities of narration’ exist whether they receive official recognition or not. The realm of memory, then, becomes a potentially powerful site for the expression of agency and the insistence on the ability of the city’s inhabitants to write that city’s meanings and futures.

Notes 1 Ivan Vladislavić, Double Negative (Cape Town: Random House, 2011), 90–91. 2 Yoliswa Sobuwa, ‘Homeless Man Wants His Shack Back from Museum’, Herald, 10 September 2014. 3 Derek Hook, (Post)Apartheid Conditions: Psychoanalysis and Social Formation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 4 Lodge, Sharpeville, 347. 5 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso Books, 2009), 22.

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Index

African National Congress 10–12, 38, 40, 58, 60, 64, 70, 132, 137, 147, 148, 167, 168, 171–73, 177, 179, 181, 183, 185, 192, 194–98, 211, 212n.1, 223, 228 Women’s League 85, 177 Youth League 200 see also armed struggle; Umkhonto weSizwe Agherdien, Yusuf 1, 91, 93, 94, 99, 115–23, 126, 205, 226 see also Double Vision (exhibition) Amabutho 12, 25–26, 40, 182–85, 192–93, 194, 200, 209–10, 212n.1, 224, 226–28 actions 26, 176, 181, 183–91, 194–95, 205 collective memory 23, 167–70, 183, 192, 194–96, 198–99, 201–4, 206–7, 210, 227 formation of (1980s) 168, 171–72, 179, 181–84 iconography 168, 201, 210, 217n.89 landscapes and sites 184, 204–8, 211–12 recognition of 169, 175, 194–99, 208, 210–12, 227 reconstitution of 25, 169, 198 apartheid 3, 14, 18, 36–38, 93, 138, 176, 188, 209, 210 collaborators 26, 187, 191 legacies 16, 40–41, 125, 162, 197, 221, 225, 227, 228 memory 7, 19, 22, 25–26, 33, 41, 43, 47, 55, 93, 146–47, 175, 204, 209, 222, 224 repression 13–14, 39, 104, 131, 148, 155, 176, 179 resistance 11, 12, 25–26, 37, 61, 79n.8, 105, 136, 168–70, 180–83

urban geographies of 7, 14, 19, 22, 36, 41, 85–87, 96, 111, 141, 151, 160, 221 architecture colonial 2, 143, 161 memorial 21–23, 41–42, 44, 212, 126 public and civic 41, 151 social impact 22, 78, 155 see also memorials; museums; urban development archives 17, 19, 21, 23, 44, 45, 55, 69, 95, 98, 99, 118, 170, 210, 226 urban space as 9, 17, 20–22, 25–26, 41, 111, 127, 206–7 armed struggle 82n.61, 169, 172, 192–97, 210 see also Amabutho; Umkhonto weSizwe Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO) 134, 158, 182, 192–93 Barry, Michael 94, 125, 143 Bethelsdorp 41, 93 Between Joyce and Remembrance (Mark Kaplan, 2004) 174 Bisho Massacre Memorial 150 Biko House see Sanlam Building Biko, Stephen Bantu 11–12, 112, 132, 134, 160, 172, 224 political philosophies 16, 132, 134, 136, 158, 162, 228 see also Black Consciousness Movement representations of 131, 132, 143, 156–60, 163–64 see also Black Consciousness Movement biography 19, 62, 63, 105, 112, 141, 143, 153, 163, 224, 227

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Index 243

Black Consciousness Movement 16, 38, 131–34, 136, 158, 171–72, 180, 224, 228 student organisations (1960s–1970s) 132–33 Botha, George 134–35 Botha, Thozamile 176–77 boycotts 26, 174, 179–82, 187–91, 193–94 British colonialism 13, 84, 108, 141 monuments and museums 108, 138, 141, 143–47, 162 racial policies 13–14, 84 see also location strategy see also Wars of Dispossession bubonic plague (1901–1905) 14, 35–36 Calata, Fort 148, 186 Campanile 141 Campanile Frieze/Wall of Texts (Mkhonto Gwazela/Lelethu PoeticSoul Mahambehlala, 2011) 141–42 Cape Flats 178, 208 Cherry, Janet 15, 61, 85, 156, 170, 180, 187, 189, 198, 201–3, 210 civic organisations 39, 171, 174, 175–78, 180, 182 communities 3, 35, 62–63, 73, 76, 124–25, 153, 229 and development 42, 48, 55, 76–78, 225 conflict within 71, 72, 104, 175, 182 effects of forced removals 1, 86–88, 110, 124 identity 92, 100, 104, 109–10, 152, 192, 194, 201–4 organisations 25, 62, 222 participation 35, 42, 54, 62–63, 153–54 community councils 176, 178, 179, 181, 191 community museums see museums Congress of South African Students (COSAS) 39, 79n.8, 169, 172–74, 178, 180–82, 188, 193 Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) 39, 79n.8 corruption 10, 52–53, 70 COSAS Two 199 Cradock Four 186, 198–99 memorials 9, 148–50, 198–200, 224

see also Calata, Fort; Goniwe, Matthew; Mhlauli, Sicelo; Mkhonto, Sparrow deaths in detention 132, 134–35, 158–59, 172, 173–74 Defiance Campaign (1952) 11, 37 democracy 8, 12, 34, 93, 136, 139, 141, 145, 155, 162–63, 176, 177, 178, 197, 223 Democratic Alliance 10, 12 desire lines 23 District Six 20, 86, 94–98, 104, 111, 128n.26 Hands Off District Six 96 District Six Museum 94–98, 107 Dojon Financial Services 61, 69 domesticity, representations of 64–66, 106–10 Donkin Reserve 137–42, 162–63, 175, 228 Donkin, Rufane 13, 138, 140, 141 Double Vision (exhibition) 91, 115–23 Du Preez, Christopher 3, 47, 54, 56, 62, 63, 65, 94 elections 10–12, 41, 49, 138–39, 147, 223 boycotts of 176, 179 violence 159 Emlotheni Memorial 147–49, 224 Faku, Nceba 12, 40–41, 43, 49, 50, 58–60, 63, 70 Fairview 85, 86, 94, 104, 125 FIFA football World Cup (2010) 69, 70, 137, 147 Fihla, Ben 70 Freedom Charter 3, 172 forced removals 5, 13, 23, 36, 39, 55, 84–87, 96, 104 effects of 86, 94, 96, 124–25 public memory and 25, 91–94, 125, 164 remnants 1–2, 8, 110–17, 169, 226 representations of 95, 99–100, 111 see also District Six; Sophiatown; South End Frontier Wars (1779–1879) see Wars of Dispossession Galela, Champion 186, 199 gender 46, 109–10, 169, 177 see also women’s activism Godolozi, Qaqawuli 186, 199

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Goniwe, Matthew 148, 186, 187, 199 graffiti 111, 112, 131–32, 135–36, 147, 156, 163 see also public art Group Areas Act 1, 22, 25, 39, 84–88, 93, 96, 104, 162, 178 ‘Hall of Columns’ (exhibition) 61–63 Hashe, Sipho 186, 189, 199 Hector Pieterson Museum 175, 200 heritage 7, 19, 24–26, 33, 44, 67, 77, 91, 115, 125–26, 159, 221, 223–24 architectural 43, 66, 93, 154 as driver of development 22, 26, 41, 43, 48, 77, 154 intangible 19, 75–77, 93, 151, 169, 198–201, 226–27 politics of 25, 77, 92, 147, 158–60, 175, 212, 228 resources 7–8, 19, 146, 151, 153, 156 urban 24, 77, 111–12, 152, 211 Holocaust Museum (Washington DC) 105–6 housing 77, 84, 160, 163, 176, 189, 205 representations of 64–68 see also Red Location: housing issues Huyssen, Andreas 20, 44 Ibhayi Town Council 40 identity 7, 12, 19, 169, 192, 194, 222 industrial urban economy see manufacturing industry influx control see labour Jack, Mkhuseli 60, 138, 178, 179, 185, 188 Jones, Peter 134 Kabuso Report 70 Khoi heritage 92–93 kinaesthetics 77 Kliptown 3–5, 22, 43 Korsten 85, 87, 104, 124–25 Kwazakele 15, 41, 85, 158, 169, 181, 189, 193, 198, 203 Kwazakele High School 171, 176, 198 labour 14–15, 29n.42, 36–38 influx control 37–38 migrant 14, 45 organisation see trade unions

representations of 46 segregation and 36 land restitution see restitution Langa Massacre (1985) 186, 191 Memorial (Uitenhage) 150, 167–68, 199–201, 224 location strategy 14, 22, 35–36, 84 Madaka, Topsy 173, 199 Makina, Lungelwa 39, 74–75, 188 Makina, Sithembiso 39, 55 Malgas, Ernest 12, 63 Mandela, Nelson Rolihlahla 12, 38, 58, 136, 196, 201, 202 branding and symbolism 16, 137–39, 144, 163 Mandela Bay Development Agency 16, 115, 137–43, 151–54, 162–63 Mangcotywa, Mzimasi 59 manufacturing industry 2, 14–15, 36–38, 161, 173 mapping 92, 100, 107, 110–11, 195, 206–8, 212 Mbeki, Govan 12, 57–59, 63, 105, 143, 199 Mbeki family 59, 60 Mbeki, Thabo 10, 21, 181 mediation 52–53 Meltzer, Lalou 5–6, 98, 106 memorialisation 21–23, 44, 64, 91, 105–6, 115, 159–61, 198, 200–1, 204–9, 222, 227–28 memorials and monuments 3, 5–6, 8–9, 16, 33, 126, 138, 141–46, 158, 161–62, 167–69, 175, 198–200, 222, 224 empty 147–51 memory collective 94, 106, 110–11, 123–26, 150, 170, 192, 209 embodied 47, 116, 121, 127, 139, 159, 201–4, 211, 224–25 everyday 63, 105, 211, 222 landscapes of 5, 16, 21–22, 91, 112–16, 126–27, 152, 169, 204–9, 222, 228 see also Double Vision (exhibition) politics of 8–9, 12, 15, 48, 147, 194–201, 220–23, 228–29 post-apartheid 24, 26, 33, 136, 174, 210, 222, 224 practices 3, 8–9, 16, 20, 23, 25, 48, 77–78, 91, 164, 198, 201–4, 226 studies 18–19, 223

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Index 245

trauma and 19, 26, 158–61, 196, 210 Truth and Reconciliation Commission and 200–1 urban space and 6–9, 15, 17–21, 26, 110–15, 162, 204–9, 211, 224–25 memory boxes see Red Location Museum of Struggle, memory boxes Mendi memorial 148 metis 63–64 Mhlaba, Dideka 59 Mhlaba, Raymond 11, 12, 37, 57–59, 63, 143, 199 Mhlauli, Sicelo 148, 186 migrant labour see labour Mkhonto, Sparrow 148, 186 Mkwayi, Wilton 58, 74, 82n.61 M-Plan 38 Motherwell 40, 41, 148 Msezane, Sethembile 145 Mtimkulu, Simphiwo 173–74, 199 Mtukela, Gcinibandla 54 MuseumAfrica 65–66 museums 35, 45, 66, 77, 91, 93, 103, 108, 126, 164, 222–26 community 16, 19, 25, 92, 95, 115 in townships 24, 34, 43, 218n.118, 152 land restitution and 96–97 memorial 44, 222 open-air 77 ownership of 76 period rooms 107–9 post-apartheid 19, 21, 222 see also District Six Museum; Hector Pieterson Museum; Holocaust Museum (Washington DC); MuseumAfrica; No 7 Castle Hill Museum; Red Location Museum of Struggle; South End Museum National Heritage Resources Act (South Africa) 6–7, 126, 146, 151 nation-building 19, 26, 175, 194, 201, 222, 228 Natives (Urban Areas) Act (1923) 14, 84 Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho see Amabutho Nelson Mandela Bay Metro formation of (2001) 16

funding 69 municipality 16, 42, 71–72, 149, 167, 225 political fragmentation 9, 12, 47, 59, 70 see also elections New Brighton 5, 11, 37, 40, 41, 43, 45, 76, 79n.8, 84–85, 87, 148, 151–54, 169, 201, 204 establishment of 24, 36 representations of 62, 74 see also Defiance Campaign (1952); Kwazakele; New Brighton Riots (1952); Red Location; Singaphi Street upgrade New Brighton Concerned Residents Group 50, 51, 53, 55 New Brighton Coordinating Forum 62–63 New Brighton Riots (1952) 22, 37 Ngubelanga, Xolisa 156–57 No 7 Castle Hill Museum 108 Noero, Jo 34, 43–44, 70–71, 76 see also Noero Wolff Architects Noero Wolff Architects 43, 49 Northern Areas 41, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 115, 124–25 Northern Areas History and Heritage Project 125–26 Uprisings (1990) 125–26 Nyayo House 158–59 Olver, Crispian 10 oral history 17–19, 30n.44, 86, 90–91, 103, 153, 170, 191–92, 210–11 in exhibitions 62, 91, 108–9, 115–21 Pan-Africanist Congress 38, 171 participation & consultation 15, 35, 41, 48–49, 53, 56, 63 exhibitions 62–63 urban development projects 153–54 see also communities pass laws see labour PEBCO Three 189, 199 see also Galela, Champion; Godolozi, Qaqawuli; Hashe, Sipho photography 62, 65, 92, 93, 95, 98, 99–107, 175, 195, 200, 206 family 102–4, 106, 126–27 memory and 25, 91, 94, 110, 115–23, 226 orality and 116–18, 121–23

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police 10 apartheid 37, 39–40, 133, 167, 172–73, 175, 176, 180, 181, 186–87, 190, 192, 195, 205–6, 208 Eastern Cape Security Branch 12, 40, 131–32, 134, 173–74, 186, 194, 205 Port Elizabeth 2, 10, 12, 16, 43–44, 52, 62, 70, 96, 102, 104, 124, 131, 133, 136, 154, 161, 167, 186 City Council and municipality 33, 42 see also Nelson Mandela Bay Metro history of 13–15, 22, 36–37, 38, 40, 45, 84–87, 108, 138 Historical Society 93 Transitional Local Council 24, 40 Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation (PEBCO) 39, 79n.8, 176–79, 182, 186, 188, 189, 191 Port Elizabeth Land and Community Restoration Association (PELCRA) 97, 128n.26 Port Elizabeth Women’s Organisation (PEWO) 177, 179 Port Elizabeth Youth Congress (PEYCO) 178, 181, 182, 188, 193, 227 postmemory 105–6 Post Chalmers 173, 186, 199 Prince, Sidney 89, 112–14 public art 25, 131, 136, 145, 154–55, 156–58, 164 social cohesion 141, 155, 162 urban renewal and 137, 151, 163 see also graffiti; Mandela Bay Development Agency (MBDA); Route 67; Singaphi Street upgrade Queen Victoria (John Roscoe Williams, 1902) 143–47 Radio Freedom 181, 185, 202 ‘rainbow nation’ 11, 16, 34, 86–87, 104, 136, 145, 222, 228 reburials 57–60, 199 Reconstruction and Development Programme 51 Red Location as symbolic space 40, 74–75 establishment of 24, 35–36, 66 historical significance 74–75 housing issues 47–55, 64–68, 70–73, 75, 225

in-situ upgrading 55 material & developmental needs 24, 42, 48 original wood and iron housing 7, 27n.7, 36, 39–41, 50, 66–68, 73–75 see also housing; Red Location Cultural Precinct, original house remnant political mobilisation in 36–38, 40, 42, 75, 205 see also resistance tenure and land rights 48, 55, 74 threats of removal (1986) 40, 55 Red Location Art Gallery and Library 24, 34, 47, 68–69, 71, 161, 225 Red Location Cultural Precinct 24, 33, 47, 64 architectural competition 41–43 community relationships 71–75 conflicts with residents 47, 50, 51, 54, 65, 71, 74 construction of 50–51, 71–72 expectations of 34, 42–43, 76 funding and budgets 49–50, 69 original house remnant 64, 66–67, 226 origins of 41 protests related to 51–54, 71, 73 staffing 57, 69–70 Red Location Museum of Struggle 3, 5, 12–13, 23, 24, 47, 50 closure of (2013) 24, 33, 34–35, 47, 72 design 24, 44–47, 56–57, 76, 126 see also memory boxes; narratives and curatorial strategy developmental ambitions 34, 66 exhibitions 46, 57, 60–62, 64–66 see also “Hall of Columns” (exhibition); Red Location Cultural Precinct, original house remnant mausoleum 57–60 see also Mbeki, Govan; Mhlaba, Raymond; reburials memory boxes 44–46, 61, 64 narratives and curatorial strategy 44–45, 56 opening 33, 56–57, 59 see also Red Location Cultural Precinct; Red Location Art Gallery and Library

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Index 247

resistance 15, 24, 36, 38–40, 42, 104, 133–34, 147, 168, 170, 175–79, 188 Eastern Cape, in 11–15, 132 representations of 43, 62, 75, 99, 104–5, 148, 204 see also Amabutho; Congress of South African Students; Defiance Campaign (1952); M-Plan; Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation; Red Location, political mobilization in; Soweto Uprisings (1976); township uprisings (1980s); Umkhonto weSizwe; United Democratic Front restitution 16, 26 land 95–97 symbolic 25, 141–42, 155, 169, 222 right to the city 8, 21, 26, 223 Rhodes Must Fall/Fees Must Fall 11, 136, 144–46, 162 Richmond Hill/EmaXambeni 36, 84–85 Rio de Janeiro 77 Riordan, Rory 61, 62, 71, 76 Rivonia Trial (1963) 11, 38, 58 Route 67, 136–44, 162–63, 227, 228 Sanlam Building 131–32, 134–35, 156 commemoration 158–59 housing development 160–61, 163 segregation 7, 11, 14, 19, 20, 22, 25, 36, 41, 85–86, 96, 138 legacies of 24, 78, 161–62 see also forced removals; Group Areas Act service delivery 49, 70, 77 Sharpeville Massacre (1960) 10, 167, 186, 222 Singaphi Street upgrade 151–54, 163 Sisulu, Walter 37, 58 slum clearance 25, 84, 96, 128n.10 Sophiatown 20, 84, 87, 95, 104 South African Communist Party 58 South African Heritage Resources Agency 7 South African War (1899–1902) 36, 146 South End forced removals from 25, 85–90 Group Areas Act classification of 1 redevelopment 87–88, 97 remnants of 7, 110–15, 126 see also Double Vision (exhibition)

South End Museum 25, 86, 89, 91–92, 97, 111, 115, 125 exhibitions 92, 98–105, 106–10 founding of 93–95 heritage walks 112–15 postmemory and 105–6 Soweto-on-Sea 12, 40, 183–84, 191–92, 193, 195, 204–6, 208 Soweto uprisings (1976) 10, 38, 133–34, 148, 171–72, 173, 176 heritage representations 143, 175, 194, 198, 199 influence on 1980s uprisings 38, 171–74, 180 States of Emergency 174, 176, 178, 186–87, 188, 189, 194 Steve Biko Centre (Ginsburg) 150, 228 street and area committees 38, 169, 187, 195 struggle songs 201–4, 218n.108 Stuurman, Dawid 92–93 Tambo, Oliver 181, 183, 194 tourism 16, 77, 144, 147, 151, 163, 208, 218n.118, 223 economic development and 42–43, 66, 76–77, 152 effects on community 65–66, 74 heritage and 5, 95, 140, 142, 175, 199, 212 township uprisings (1980s) 8, 12, 15, 25, 38, 40, 79n.8, 168, 170, 171–75, 176, 178–83 accounts of 39, 139, 193–94, 197–98, 204–9 commemoration of 198–204 see also Amabutho trade unions 14–15, 18, 37, 79n.8, 168, 171, 173, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180 trauma 7, 10, 19, 86, 91, 94, 98, 105, 111, 113, 119, 125, 155–56, 158–60, 175, 192, 196, 200, 204, 208–10, 221–22, 226 tri-cameral parliament 178–79 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa) 34, 132, 134, 155, 174, 186, 193, 194, 200–1, 207, 217n.102 Tutu, Desmond 136, 200–1 Tutu, Jimmy 50, 51, 53 Uitenhage 15, 16, 66, 133, 136, 167–68, 170, 173, 178–79, 181, 186, 191 see also Langa Massacre (1985)

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Umkhonto weSizwe 82n.61, 148, 169, 170, 173, 183, 193, 194, 197, 202, 203, 208 UNESCO 19, 76 United Democratic Front 38, 170, 174–75, 177, 178–79, 182, 187, 189, 192 AZAPO conflict 182, 192–93 Women’s Congress 177 urban development 41, 48–49, 56, 66, 68, 76–78, 96, 97, 110, 126, 137, 161, 223, 225, 228 design-led 21–23, 40, 42–44, 56, 141–42, 151–54 see also Mandela Bay Development Agency; Red Location Cultural Precinct; Route 67; Singaphi Street upgrade urbanisation 13, 45 Veeplaas 12, 169, 185, 190, 195, 198, 204, 205, 207, 208 violence 15, 22, 26, 37, 125, 152, 159, 175, 182–83, 188, 191 public memory and 193–96, 208–10, 227 state-driven 10, 133–35, 156, 172, 173, 186–87, 192–93 see also Amabutho; deaths in detention; police

visual art 92, 94, 98, 152–53, 156 see also graffiti; public art Voting Line (Harris and Geel 2010/2011) 138–39, 155 walking tours 111–12, 127, 140 see also Prince, Sidney; Western Cape Action Tours Walmer police station 134, 156–59 Wars of Dispossession 13, 14 Wayile, Zanoxolo 70 Western Cape Action Tours 208 Williams, Charmaine 60 Wolff, Heinrich 43 women’s activism 2, 47, 169, 177, 188 young lions see Amabutho youth and student activism 38, 132–35, 169, 171, 179, 181–82 cultural politics 15–16, 136, 157–58, 160 see also Amabutho; Black Consciousness Movement; Rhodes Must Fall/Fees Must Fall movement; Soweto Uprisings (1976) Zuma, Jacob 10–11 Zwide 58, 199, 204