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Freedom Park and PostcolonialMonumentalityAndries OliphantPublished online: 18 Jun 2013.

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Freedom Park andPostcolonial Monumentality

Andries Oliphant

Whenever colonization sets in with its dominant culture, it devours thenative culture and leaves behind a bastardized culture that can. . . onlythrive at the rate and pace allowed it by the dominant culture. This iswhat happened to the African culture.

Steve Biko1

However, if the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, ifhe listens to history he finds there is ‘something altogether different’behind things: not a timeless essential secret, but the secret that theyhave no essence or that the essence was fabricated in a piecemealfashion from alien forms.

Michel Foucault2

ONE

This text is presented in six fragments. Its object is the emerging post-Apart-heid monumentality as manifested in Freedom Park, conceived as an auth-entic African postcolonial memorial. Drawing on apparently disparatetheories of history, culture and nationalism, it reflects on the African nation-alist underpinnings of the conceptualization, design and construction of thevarious elements that make up Freedom Park, situated south of Pretoria.

Benedict Anderson’s demystification of modern nationalisms as ima-ginary political constructs shaped by economic and cultural factors is rel-evant here since it debunks essentialist assertions, such as those of ErnestRenan,3 that the temporal unfolding and attainment of nationhood arepredestined historical culminations of a narrative with primordial andeternal coordinates.4 Applied to South Africa, I think this enables a reflec-tive engagement with the invention of a South African national narrativethrough Freedom Park. A keystone post-Apartheid national monumentand memorial, the Park was conceived to reorganize and transformevery aspect of South African heritage by fully articulating and renderingvisible the African identity of South Africa that has for centuries beensilenced and subjected to erasures.

Third Text, 2013

Vol. 27, No. 3, 303–314, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.796202

# 2013 Third Text

1. Steve Biko, ‘Some AfricanCultural Concepts’, in IWrite What I Like, AelredStubbs, ed, Heinemann,London, Ibadan andNairobi, 1979, p 46

2. Michel Foucault,‘Nietzsche, Genealogy,History’, in Language,Counter-Memory, Practice:Selected Essays andInterviews, Donald FBouchard, ed, CornellUniversity Press, Ithaca,1977, p 142

3. Ernest Renan, ‘What is aNation?’ in Nation andNarration, Homi Bhabha,ed, Routledge, New York,1990, p 19

4. Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities:Reflection on the Originand Spread of Nationalism,Verso, London andNew York, 1991, p 615

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Engaging by means of critical reflections on nationalism and monu-ments, all presuppositions of precise historical origin as the startingpoint of a continuous evolutionary narrative of the national destiny ofa society and a people are eschewed in favour of the postulation thathistory, that is the actual temporal process of social developments, asFriedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault have it, is haphazard, differen-tiated, fractured, dispersed, marked by discontinuities and ruptures.Rather than unfolding in steady and stable preordained evolutionarymanner, history is more often than not ‘born of chance’.5

TWO

Freedom Park, as a postcolonial national memorial of monumental pro-portions, became possible in the wake of the end of minority rule in SouthAfrica in 1994. It was launched by Thabo Mbeki, then president, on 16June 2001. In his speech on the occasion, he pointed out that the datefor the launch was chosen to coincide with the commemoration of theyouth-led uprising of 1976.6 The sacrifices made by young peoplereignited the struggle for liberation after a decade of political inactivityfollowing the repression of the early 1960s, which prohibited all theanti-Apartheid organizations and pursued a policy of imprisonment andbanishment of political leaders.7 Thus the ‘sacrifices that our youngpeople made to ensure that we attain our freedom’ were invoked byMbeki as one episode in the larger national narrative of the struggle forfreedom.8

As a presidential project, Freedom Park is partly a response torecommendations by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)

Freedom Park, Moshate, photo: Vincent Vilakazi, Audio-Visual Content Producer, Freedom Park

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5. Foucault, op cit, p 155

6. Thabo Mbeki, ‘Launch ofFreedom Park. Pretoria’,16 June 2002, speech issuedby the Office of thePresident, p 1

7. Ernest Harsch, SouthAfrica: White Rule: BlackRevolt, Monad, New York,p 266

8. Mbeki, op cit, p 1

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that material and symbolic reparations be made to victims of pastconflicts and that the past be kept alive by studying and rememberingit. However, already in 1999, some four years before the publication ofthe TRC’s Report, Nelson Mandela, then retired as president, prefiguredand even named the memorial by announcing:

The day should not be far off, when we shall have a people’s shrine, aFreedom Park, where we shall honour with all the dignity they deserve,those who endured pain so that we should be experiencing the joy offreedom.9

This purpose, of honouring those who paid the ultimate price for freedomin a dignified manner, would remain the ethical and ceremonial core ofFreedom Park as a national memorial – the monument was also,however, to acquire other features.

Given this, the scope of the project was first adumbrated and circu-lated in a Freedom Park ‘Position Paper’ in 2000. This was followed bya ‘Conceptual Framework’ and ‘A Vision for the Design Brief’ formulatedfor an international architectural and design competition in 2004. Inthese documents, the memorial is conceptualized to narrate four centuriesof intermittent but prolonged and fluctuating resistance against colonial-ism. In these documents, the narrative begins with the opposition of theKhoi and the San to the Dutch occupation and subsequent permanentsettlement of Europeans in the Cape Peninsula in 1652. This is followedby the slave revolts later in the century and the frontier wars in the EasternCape, Natal and the interior in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,including the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902. From there the narrativefocus takes on the modern phase of the national liberation struggle,with two world wars mixed in, right up to the hour of liberation. Itwas conceived as a narrative and designed to memorialize those wholost their lives in the many conflicts during the five centuries of colonialcontact, conquest and resistance.

This scope, with its focus on the loss of life in conflicts and strugglesfor freedom, was dramatically expanded in Mbeki’s speech at thelaunch of Freedom Park. He characterized the liberation narrative asnecessary and important but as ‘narrow’ if it ‘would refer only to thestruggle of political freedom and therefore [serve as] a symbol ofacknowledgement of the heroes and heroines of our struggle forfreedom’. He called for ‘broad sense’ of the idea of freedom to encompassthe entire evolution of the species. It came to cover the total natural andsocial history of South Africa as an example, if not the very embodiment,of some universal human history.10 This grandiosity is, as we shall see, theexpression of its aspirations to universality, which are quintessentiallynationalist.

This extended narrative, Mbeki said, ‘begins at the beginning’. Itsoriginal commencement is based on the emergence of organic cellularlife on earth and dates back 3.6 billion years in Barberton in the north-east of South Africa, where evidence of the first known ‘singular cellularorganisms, later evolving into multi-cellular life forms, like animals andhumans’ are deposited in rocks.11 The purpose of this narrative is ‘toboldly assert the fact that our land is a cradle of humanity’ and tonarrate ‘the totality history of the South African story’ in order to coverevery sphere of life and every important human achievement.12

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9. Freedom Park InformationLeaflet, Freedom ParkTrust, Pretoria, undated,p 1

10. Mbeki, op cit, p 3

11. Mbeki, op cit, p 10

12. Ibid, p 4

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It should be noted that Mbeki employs the indefinite article to refer toa place of the origin of humanity, rather than the definite article to signifySouth Africa as the place of human origin. This renders the assertion rela-tive and in so doing ameliorates the grandiose claims to which nationalistdiscourse is prone.

The above qualification notwithstanding, the grand repositioningof Freedom Park to cover 3.6 billion years demanded an all-embracing national narrative constructed from a postcolonial perspec-tive, linking the liberation of South Africa to the idea of the origin oflife and its gradual evolution towards the birth of humans. Mbekielaborates:

In Sterkfontein, Kromdraai, Makopane and numerous sites scatteredthrough the country, we have rich evidence that these are the placeswhere the first humans emerged, developed, learnt to walk, foundgainful use of their hands and began to construct early factories andengaged in the rudimentary elements of technology.

Citing a poem by Keorapetse Kgositsile, the South African PoetLaureate, ‘If I Could Sing’, which refers to ‘the still voice of theland’, ‘my father before my father/who knew of the uses of fire’ andthe fact that ‘time was not born yesterday’, Mbeki urges thatFreedom Park resolutely give voice to the silenced ‘story of ourbeing’.13 This owes as much to Mbeki’s grand vision of an imminentAfrican Renaissance as to the cultural orientations and poeticimagination of Mongane Wally Serote, the then chief executiveofficer of the project.

Freedom Park, Isivivane’s Lekgotla, photo: Vincent Vilakazi, Audio-Visual Content Producer, Freedom Park

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13. Ibid, p 10

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THREE

Freedom Park’s self-conception is thus closely linked to the liberation ofSouth Africa from colonial rule as seen from an African nationalist per-spective, and to the conception of a postcolonial African identity asexpounded by Thabo Mbeki in an address to parliament titled ‘I am anAfrican’ in 1996.14 Like the speech ‘I am an African’, the monumentseeks to affirm the African identity of South Africa and its capacity toaccommodate and absorb other identities and cultures within an expan-sive and inclusive African nationalist social, political and culturalagenda, led by Black Africans.

In keeping with all nationalist discourse, of whatever vintage, the con-ception and narrative of Freedom Park invokes remote natural and ances-tral origins based within the boundaries of the national territory. Itappropriates the entire history of the native land as part of a predestinednarrative in which successive generations who fought colonial domina-tion and fulfilled the historical destiny of a people are enshrined and mem-orialized. Accordingly, it requires history to be selectively reconstructedand applied to this end. The repeated injunctions of non-racial inclusive-ness and universal humanism of this discourse, it transpires, are not quiteas universal as they are made out to be.

In the case of South Africa, it is postulated that since Africa gave theworld humanity, humanism is originally and inherently African, SouthAfrica being the paradigm of this. Thus, a part of humanity born inSouth Africa ‘migrated to different corners of the world’, only to returnlater ‘with ideas of being superior to those from whom they originated’.15

This betrayal of the principle of the indivisible equality of humanity and thedistorted history of Africa imposed by the returning European colonizersaccordingly calls for correction. Freedom Park is entrusted with this taskof exorcizing and healing the double violations and defilements of human-ity inflicted by the colonists on themselves and on the colonized. Theresources for the restoration of humanity, in both the colonized and thecolonizer, reside in the primordial African concept of ubuntu, which pro-claims human interdependence, reciprocity and social solidarity, socialbonds and caring. This concept permeates through and punctuates everyconcept and design document of Freedom Park.

It all amounts to a simultaneous appeal in one gesture to universalhumanity and, in another, to the national roots of humanity as locatedin South Africa, producing a rupture. The split resides in what JacquesDerrida identified as the universal political form of independence andfreedom from foreign domination engendered by nationalist aspirationsto self-determination and the eventual embodiment of these in the sover-eign nation-state, membership of which is acquired first by nativity andsecond by naturalization. The universal political form of nationalfreedom is thus filled up with relative nationalist cultural and historicalcontent.16 Hence Mbeki points out:

Different countries across the world celebrate their freedoms in a variety ofways. This is done by building museums, constructing statues and desig-nating specific days as Freedom Days.17

Mozambique, Ghana, the United States and France are given as examplesof how ‘different countries. . . celebrate’ their freedom from either feudal

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14. Thabo Mbeki, ‘I am anAfrican. Pretoria’, 18 May1996, speech issued by theOffice of the President

15. Mbeki, ‘Launch ofFreedom Park’, op cit, p 5

16. Jacques Derrida, Spectersof Marx: The State of theDebt, the Work ofMourning and the NewInternational, PeggyKamuf, trans, Routledge,New York and London,1994, p 169

17. Mbeki, ‘Launch ofFreedom Park’, op cit, p 1

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tyranny or imperial domination and colonialism. South Africa’s declara-tion of 27 April as Freedom Day consequently marks the transformationof South Africa ‘from an apartheid country to a democratic society’.18

FOUR

Freedom Park is situated on Salvokop, a hill on the southern outskirts ofPretoria. From the crest of the hill the stark mass of the granite Voortrek-ker Monument, a neoclassical European structure built in 1937 to com-memorate the Afrikaners who left the Cape Colony between 1835 and1854, rises to the west on what was once known as Monument Hill.19

To the north-east, the arched sandstone structure of the Union Buildings,built in 1910 in the English monumental style to serve as the seat of theUnion Government established that year, comes into view on thesouthern slopes of Meintjieskop.20

This spatial arrangement is deliberate. It serves to mark two inter-related historical moments from the colonial past, namely Afrikanernationalism as represented by the Voortrekker Monument, and BritishImperialism as manifested in the Union Buildings. They signify the culmi-nation of colonial rule and white supremacy in South Africa. In contrastto the pronounced visibility of these two structures, Freedom Park is forthe most part embedded in the contours of Salvokop to signify a counter-structure based on African architectural aesthetics and sensitivity to thenatural environment. From below the hill all that is visible are sectionsof the low stone walls of Iron Age settlements such as Tulamela andMapungubwe, and the arch of metal poles, the tips of which areilluminated at night, representing the reeds which gave birth to humans

Freedom Park, Isikhumbuto’s Reeds, photo: Vincent Vilakazi, Audio-Visual Content Producer, Freedom Park

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18. Ibid

19. To see images and furtherdetails of the VoortrekkerMonument, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voortrekker_Monument.

20. To see images and furtherdetails of the UnionBuildings, go to http://en.wikipedia.org./wiki/Union_ Buildings.

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as narrated in an Nguni story of origin. It represents the African nation-alist alternative to the ethnic nationalist and imperialist VoortrekkerMonument and the Union Buildings inscribed in bricks and mortar onthe hills around the capitol.

Isivivane, a symbolic burial place encircled by eleven rocks – ratherthan the monumental boulders one might have expected – is perhapsthe most significant symbolic site of Freedom Park as an African memor-ial. Collected from the nine provinces, the rocks represent the fallen fromeach provincial territory, with two further rocks signifying national gov-ernment and the sacrifices of the international community. They arearranged in a circle around a shallow pond from which smoke rises asfrom a thermal pool. This circular structure contains the Lesaka, whichsymbolically represents the cattle enclosure that served as the burialplace in the homesteads of traditional pastoral societies. The plume offine mist rising from the centre of the site symbolizes the cleansedspirits of the fallen rising on their journey to the ancestral realm of theeternal living.

The rocks function in the same way as the cairns of stones found onpathways left by travellers as tokens of respect for the dead, as supplica-tions to them for a safe journey on a long path into the unknown, and inhomage to the landscape.21 At both entrances to this site there are bodiesof water that serve symbolic and ritual purposes, such as the cleansingceremonies which took place in all the provinces where the rocks werecollected. Cleansing ceremonies are performed at death in order topurify the deceased of evil contaminations before they enter the eternaldomain of immortal ancestors. Thus the site is designed to serve as a spiri-tual space for sacred enactments and remembrance. It becomes a sym-bolic space of spirituality embedded in the earth and made from itsvery elements.

S’khumbutho is a siSwati concept concerned with the practices ofremembering the dead and appealing to them to watch over, protectand counsel the living. It consists of several interrelated aspects. Thevast Wall of Names, which covers close to 700 metres, is inscribed withthe names of some 75,000 persons who lost their lives in the eight desig-nated conflicts: the pre-colonial wars, slavery, genocide, resistance, theSouth African War, the First and Second World Wars, and the liberationstruggle. However, it controversially excludes the names of soldiers whodied while serving in the Apartheid military. In response to this, the Voor-trekker Monument erected its own Wall of Names on which the names ofthese fallen soldiers now appear.

S’khumbutho also includes a Gallery of Leaders in which national andanti-colonial leaders are to be commemorated; Moshate, a gallery; Tiva, alarge body of water signifying peace; The Amphitheatre for public gath-erings; The Sanctuary; The Eternal Flame; The Reeds; Uitspanplek(Resting Place); and Mveledzo, the spiral path, which weaves throughthe site to connect all elements of the park. These elements are all of amemorializing nature directed not towards mourning but to connectingthe past with the present and the future.

This is also the case with the last two components of Freedom Park,namely //Hapo and the Pan African Archives. //Hapo is a Khoi wordmeaning ‘dream’, taken from the proverb: ‘//Hapo ge //hapo tama /haoha-sib dis tamas ka i bo’ (‘A dream is not a dream [if] it is not shared by the

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21. Graham Young, ‘TheFreedom to Design’,Innovate 2, 2007, p 51

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community’). The construction of the building was completed while theexhibitions were still in the process of being installed. In the First Draft ofthe Concept of //Hapo, a structure in ‘a horseshoe shape’ was envisaged.22

However, after a visit by the architects to Credo Mutwa, an expert on indi-genous knowledge, the building has been constructed to resemble largeboulders, symbolizing the abode of the ancestors not as the realm ofheaven but as the earth where they might dwell close to the living.//Hapo is not conceived as a conventional museum but as a multimediainteractive space of installations, exhibits, stories, performances and storyobjects which visitors will be able to touch, comment on and pass around.23

The narrative presented in //Hapo is structured in eight epochs thatunfold chronologically, commencing with ‘Earth’, the first epoch, whichdates back 3.6 billion years and aims to explore the earliest forms of lifein South Africa as well as the geological origin of the land. The second,‘Ancestors’, reconstructs the evolution of hominids going back someseven million years. The third, ‘Peopling’, focuses on the early humansettlements of South Africa going back 200,000 years and explores thediverse cultures, languages, knowledge systems, customs, beliefs andtrade networks. The fourth, ‘Colonisation’, narrates the arrival and perma-nent settlement of Europeans in South Africa in the seventeenth century.The fifth epoch, ‘Conquest and Resistance’, deals with the escalation ofconflict between advancing colonization and local resistance. The sixth,‘Industrialisation and Urbanisation’, deals with the economic and socialchanges effected by the large-scale exploitation of the vast mineral depositsin South Africa. The seventh, ‘Struggle for Liberation’, covers the nationalliberation struggles and competing nationalism of the twentieth century.The eighth and final epoch, ‘Nation Building’, takes the Truth and Recon-

Freedom Park, Isikhumbuto Amphitheatre, photo: Vincent Vilakazi, Audio-Visual Content Producer, Freedom Park

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22. History Advisory Panel,‘Concept of //Hapo: FirstDraft’, Freedom ParkTrust, Pretoria, February2007

23. Hendrik Prinsloo,‘Freedom Park: SouthAfrica’s Flagship HeritagePrecinct’, Innovate 5,2010, pp 74–75

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ciliation Commission work as a starting point and tracks developmentsince 1994.24

The narrative is informed by the key principles of humanity, freedom,and reconciliation on which Freedom Park is based to foreground Africanexperience and knowledge in order to ‘emancipate the long-silencedAfrican voice’. To this end, the names for the various elements aremostly taken from African languages, while Uitspanplek is Afrikaans, sig-nifying the unharnessing of oxen for stopovers and rest by the Voortrek-kers during migrations, and the name of the memorial itself, FreedomPark, is English, as are all the titles of the epochs.

Further, a striking hybridization and mixed aesthetics are at work inthe various parts of Freedom Park. This is signified by the apparently mul-tilingual nomenclature of the names of the memorial’s various elements,named in African languages to signify their Africanicity, while closerexamination reveals affinities with established memorial traditions. Forinstance, the Wall of Names is very similar to established war memorialsfound all over the world. Likewise, //Hapo’s narrative relies on a chrono-logical mode of historical representation grounded in notions of progress.The Eternal Flame and Gallery of Heroes are also stock memorial tropes.

FIVE

The conception of Freedom Park is ambitious and monumental in itsmagnitude. It aims to recuperate a history and culture of South Africathat has been denigrated, distorted and repressed by colonialism. In thisregard, the cultural diagnostics of Frantz Fanon25 and Steve Biko are rel-evant.26 Both recognized the importance of culture in the construction ofindividual subjectivities, social identities and the capacity for creative andradical action.

The circuit of these ideas flows from Fanon to Biko and from both toMbeki to produce the two modalities on which Freedom Park is based.First, the refutation of European falsifications of African culture andhuman achievements is a critical mode of engagement with imperialistand colonial monumentality. Second, the restoration of an African past‘in its totality’ gestures towards a postcolonial monumentality. Its exten-sive narrative sweep is clearly concerned with what Foucault calls the tra-ditional approach of historians, which pays ‘attention to long periods’ inan effort to excavate and:

. . . reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances,the irreversible processes, the constant readjustments. . . the underlyingtendencies that gather force, and are suddenly reversed after centuries ofcontinuity, the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, thegreat silent, motionless bases that traditional history has covered in athick layer of events.27

In the case of Freedom Park, this ‘thick layer of events’ is further coatedwith layers of indigenous cultural and knowledge systems integral toconstruction of a timeless African identity.

History such as this, Nietzsche contends, is necessary for the living inthree different ways: one, in relation to action and struggle; two, forconservatism and reverence; and, three, for deliverance from suffering.

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24. ‘Concept of //Hapo: FirstDraft’, op cit, pp 9–10

25. Frantz Fanon, ‘OnNational Culture’, in TheWretched of the Earth,Constance Farrington,trans, Penguin, London,1990, pp 165–199

26. Biko, op cit, pp 140–147

27. Michel Foucault, TheArchaeology of Knowledgeand The Discourse onLanguage, A M SheridanSmith, trans, Pantheon,New York, 1972, p 3

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These three uses engender three forms of history: the monumental, theantiquarian and the critical.28

In the case of monumental history, the past is enlisted as a source ofinspiration and encouragement by emulating the heroic deeds, sacrificesand fame of past examples, in the absence of such models in thepresent. By invoking the great moments of history, a continuum is estab-lished between the past and the present which invokes and demands thereturn and eternal perpetuation of monumental history. The danger ofadulation of a monumental past as the source, impulse and model foremulation invariably modifies and distorts, ultimately falsifying and fic-tionalizing history.29 Such history becomes a parody insofar as the pastcannot, strictly speaking, be repeated.30

Antiquarian history is derived from the compulsion to preserve thepast. This induces a backward-looking passivity and reverence for thispast to such an extent that it leads to the hoarding of sentimental memor-abilia and compulsive collection of stuffy and archaic objects. This modeof history:

. . . only understands how to preserve life, not to create it, having, unlikemonumental history, no certain instinct for it. Thus it hinders themighty impulse to a new deed and paralyses the doer, who must always,as doer, be gazing at some piety or other.

Critical history seeks to break with and even dismantle the past. It haulsthe past ‘before the bar of judgment’ to ‘interrogate it remorselessly, andfinally condemn it’.31 The past is subjected to the remorseless and merci-less force of life which destroys everything that once lived in the ceaselessrenewal demanded by life. This establishes a relationship between life andjustice, since the ‘past is critically examined, the knife put to its roots and

Freedom Park, //Hapo Museum, photo: Vincent Vilakazi, Audio-Visual Content Producer, Freedom Park

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28. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘TheUse and Abuse of History’,in The Philosophy ofNietzsche, Geoffrey Clive,ed, Signet, New York,1965, p 225

29. Ibid, p 227

30. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche,Genealogy, History’, opcit, pp 160–161

31. Nietzsche, op cit, p 231

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all the “pieties” are grimly trodden under foot’ in a ruthless and evendangerous attempt to overcome the errors and the dead and stultifyinginheritance of the past.32

SIX

There is a remarkable relationship between Nietzsche’s conception of thethree uses of history and Fanon’s conception of the three phases throughwhich a national liberation culture develops. The first phase involves theunqualified assimilation of colonial culture by the colonized. This resultsin alienation from native culture. The second phase involves a rediscoveryof past mummified and stultifying traditions which are not able torespond fully to the revolutionary demands of the times. The thirdphase is called the ‘fighting phase’ and produces a revolutionary literaturedirected to radical emancipation.33 Given this, Fanon’s second phaseclosely resembles Nietzsche’s monumentalization of history and culture,while his third ‘fighting phase’ is akin to Nietzsche’s critical mode ofhistorical application.

This can be compared to Biko’s conception of African culturethat embraces Fanon’s second and third phases in so far as BlackConsciousness propounded the necessity that blacks reaffirm their ownculture as a precondition for breaking the psychological and culturalshackles of colonialism. Black Consciousness, he wrote, ‘seeks to infusethe black community with a new-found pride in themselves, theirefforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and outlook onlife’.34 His conception of African culture embraces both traditional andmodern culture, which in his view is fundamentally communal, egalitar-ian and humanist in nature and the diametrical opposite of the individua-listic and materialistic colonial culture of the West.35 As a blend of anti-colonial criticism and a determination to instil pride in Africans for theirheritage, Biko’s views relate intimately to the emancipatory discourses ofAfrican Nationalism as articulated by Mbeki.

This discourse is given architectural, symbolic and memorial rep-resentation in Freedom Park, primarily in a postcolonial monumentalform that venerates the pre-colonial African past of South Africa in agesture that is simultaneously critical of colonial monumentalism.What is lacking, it seems, is a critical gaze at the putative exemplaryAfrican humanism and the tendency to construe the African ascontinuous and homogenous. This retrospective orientation, howeverrestorative and self-affirmative in intent, Fanon points out, runsthe danger of turning away from present challenges by dwelling onthe past and obsolete traditions and customs. These outmoded ‘shellsand corpses’ are incommensurate with contemporary challenges, andhinder critical and creative engagement directed towards a fully eman-cipated future.36

Hence Biko’s caution not to treat African culture as fixed andstabilized in the pre-colonial past. He writes:

I am against the belief that African culture is time-bound, the notion thatwith the conquest of the African all his culture was obliterated. I am alsoagainst the belief that when one talks of African culture one is necessarilytalking of the pre-Van Riebeeck culture. Obviously the African culture has

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32. Ibid, p 231

33. Fanon, The Wretched ofthe Earth, op cit, pp, 179

34. Biko, op cit, p 49

35. Ibid, pp 41–47

36. Fanon, The Wretched ofthe Earth, op cit,pp 180–181

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had to sustain severe blows and may have been battered nearly out ofshape by the belligerent cultures it collided with, yet in essence eventoday one can easily find the fundamental aspects of the pure Africanculture in the present day African. Hence in talking aboutAfrican culture I am going to refer as well as to what is termed modernAfrican culture.37

His cautionary remark, although still haunted by essences, fundamen-tals and continuities, is important in so far as it draws attention to thedynamic nature of culture and its potential to respond creatively tocurrent challenges and play a role in the radical emancipation andhumanization of society. This humanization presupposes a radical affir-mation of the culturally diverse yet basic indivisibility of humanity. Suchuniversality is what Freedom Park ostensibly aspires to, but like all theother examples of national memorialization in Africa and elsewhere, itsideological orientation, narrative and symbolism are decidedly, andperhaps unavoidably, localized and national, its efficacies directedtowards an African nationalist grounding of post-Apartheid SouthAfrican society.37. Biko, op cit, p 41

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