One of my favourite statues is the one of Nelson Mandela at the Sandton City shopping centre in Johannesburg. Larger than life, its oversized bronze shoes shimmer in the evening light, polished by the hands of many passersby who crowd around to take pictures with it. At the entrance of a square in the mall, it’s a jovial image of the former South African president in a lively jive: a decidedly odd juxtaposition of a liberation fighter at a site of luxury retail.
As a scholar of heritage and contested public cultures, I am intrigued by the complicated links between cultural heritage and capitalist exchange. It seems that, after 30 years of democracy, struggle heritage in South Africa has ever more been recruited to conceal the gap between the reality of an economically unequal and unjust present rather than serve as an critical reminder about the freedoms and equality aspired for during the apartheid past.
The irony of struggle heritage, in this case, as the dancing Mandela statue may well signify, is that heritage is negotiated and not fixed. In a democratic dispensation heritage is that which is negotiated in disputes between individuals who enjoy the freedom of property rights, the state and often the market. This type of dispute and adjudication occurs the world over – look at museum objects appropriated during colonial times, for example.
Built at enormous cost, the project toured the nation and came home to the Canal Walk shopping centre 20km outside Cape Town. At a cost of R20 per adult , families can now immerse themselves in history, take pictures with anti-colonial and anti-apartheid heroes and learn about the past as they wander among the lifelike statues marching in static unison outside the mall.
Strange entanglements Recognising these strange entanglements – which exist the world over – takes us beyond the false opposition between commerce and commemoration. It flags a set of deeper contradictions that I think the Mandela statue in Sandton Square gestures at. That is: struggle heritage has increasingly been recruited to mask the discrepancy between the unsettling material inequalities and contradictions in our society that it is meant to call attention to.
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