Re-envisioning Greater Johannesburg: South African heritage development in the first decade of democracy

African Arts, Winter, 2004 by Elizabeth Delmont

Changes in heritage legislation in South Africa, as elsewhere, speak to the present as much as the past. Thus, South African heritage legislation evolved from the Bushman Relics Protection Act of 1911, which sought to preserve the country's precolonial and prehistoric heritage, through the 1934 Historical Monuments Commission, which protected the built environment of settlers and colonists, to the National Monuments Act of 1969, which was designed to bolster the state ideology of Afrikaner Nationalism and separate development. By 1994, therefore, out of 4000 national monuments, no less than 98% represented colonial and settler history, with the remainder comprising natural heritage geological, paleontological, archaeological, and rock art sites (Deacon et al. 2003:11). In the 1980s, however, in opposition to the Grand Narrative of official heritage, there were already alternative contestations and small pockets of resistance in the form of "a counter archive" such as the District Six Museum in Cape Town (Rassool and Prosalendis 2001). The National Heritage Resources Act of 1999, while concerned to acknowledge the achievements of these few challenges to the dominant ideology, took on the task of transforming existing "mainstream" heritage institutions and of giving more voice to indigenous forms of heritage. Borrowing from the Burra Charter developed by Australia's International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) in the late 1970s, the new Heritage Act emphasizes the notion of living and intangible heritage and argues both for the idea of cultural significance and for redress to previously marginalized heritages. The Act emphasizes capacity building, in line with attempts to grow the country's human resources and skills base post-1994, and public education and, while acknowledging the importance of heritage resources for tourism and economic development, it argues for the management of these resources in a sustainable and sensitive way.

The program of nation-building that underlies the Heritage Resources Act, however, is not without its problems. There are obvious anomalies in the formation of modern nation-states within an era of globalization (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). South Africa is reimagining its community and affirming its sense of national identity at the very moment that currencies are amalgamating, borders are becoming more permeable, trade and industry barriers are being reduced, and the global economic landscape is being marked by the logos of the great multinational corporations. This is the real context in which cultural diversity as a tool for nation-building is being asserted, while still maintaining a human rights discourse. Deacon et al. relate this dilemma to what they term "post-national citizenship': global citizenship which allows people to assume universal rights and responsibilities, and more localized, distinctive forms of cultural citizenship, which affirm the distinctive cultural identity of citizens and assert claims for the recognition and protection of that identity" (2003:8). On the global level, these universal rights and responsibilities enable the "metacultural operation by which habitus is transformed into heritage and by which local or national heritage is transformed into world heritage" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2002:2). Since 1994, five world heritage sites have been declared in South Africa: St. Lucia Wetland Park, Robben Island, and the fossil hominid sites of Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Kromdraai, and environs (known collectively as the Cradle of Humankind) all in 1999; Ukhahlamba/Drakensberg Park in 2000; and Mapungubwe cultural landscape in 2003.

Debates around the preservation of cultural diversity are further located within the local-global nexus. For the benefit of international tourists, so-called traditional cultures have been displayed after 1994 in timeless, discrete, and often anachronistic packages in the discourse of the ubiquitous cultural village (Jansen Van Vuureen 2001; Rassool and Witz 1994; Goudie et al. 1999) such as Lesedi near Johannesburg, Shangana in Mpumalanga, and Shakaland in KwaZulu-Natal (Hamilton 1998) (Fig. 1). These sites tend to blur "the line between entertainment and education and ... replace real-life survivals with simulacra of an original that never was" (Samuel 1994:259). As Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett note: "Tourism gives tribalism and colonialism a second life by bringing them back as representations of themselves and circulating them within an economy of performance" (1994:435).

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Since 1994, the South African government's program of reconciliation, inclusivity, and nation-building has been augmented by the national governmental department of Arts, Culture, Science, and Technology's Legacy Project of 1996, which was designed to promote commemorative spaces especially for previously marginalized peoples or groups. Following the unveiling on December 16, 1998, of a monument to the role of Zulus in the Ncome Battle (Blood River), the Ncome Museum was opened in 1999. To commemorate the women's anti-pass march on Pretoria in 1956, the Women's Monument, in the form of a grinding stone by artist Wilma Cruise, was inaugurated at the Union Buildings on August 9, 2000. The Samora Machel Monument, which marks the site of his plane crash at Mbuzini, was unveiled on January 19, 1999. In the Eastern Cape, the Nelson Mandela Museum, which opened on February 11, 2000, is being developed to include three elements: a museum in Umtata, a youth center in Qunu, and a visitors' center in Mvezo. Similarly, Chief Albert Luthuli's house in Kwa Duduka, KwaZulu-Natal, is being restored as an institute that promotes culture. The Freedom Park project at Salvokop in Pretoria, which was launched by President Thabo Mbeki on June 16, 2002, includes plans for a Garden of Remembrance, a memorial, and a museum incorporating the prehistory of South Africa. A Khoisan project has been initiated with input at national, provincial, and local levels to protect Khoisan heritage. Finally, the Constitutional Court, the first phase of the Constitutional Hill project in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, was opened on March 27, 2004.