Museum, memorial and mall: postcolonialism, pedagogies, racism and reconciliation

Abstract

Through museum and shopping mall and the possibilities, subtleties, banalities and disparities of reconciliation in South Africa and Australia, this paper immerses itself in the question of pedagogies and in particular the pedagogies of reconciliation, public spaces and postcolonialism. In both Australia and South Africa postcolonialism as theory and pedagogy is ambiguously positioned especially in relation to issues of reconciliation which in turn is arguably also ambiguously located. Reconciliation is or has variously been state‐sanctioned policy, project and agenda which, in part, is a process and practice of recognising and addressing histories of racism and its effects. Projects in both nations have included public, educational and schooling spheres and range, for instance, from the building of large‐scale museums to self‐initiated school and community projects. All of these involve ways of knowing and knowledge of the colonial past and a postcolonial present. Not insignificantly, they all involve the ways in which race, racism and postcolonialism are understood and represented. Central to this, the authors contend, is a necessity to bring into question the discursive practices of both racism and anti‐racism particularly as they influence and shape new emerging modalities of anti‐racism within postcolonial contexts and practices. The authors argue that an ability to analyse and deconstruct everyday spaces such as shopping malls is as integral to pedagogy as is a class excursion to a museum such as the Hector Pieterson or the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Still further, they argue that postcolonial pedagogy is itself an artefact of fraught histories deeply informed by colonial origins, local specificities and contemporary strategies of remembrance.

This ought not to have happened … Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can. (Arendt, 1993, pp. 13–14, 3 emphasis in original)

Whatever your age, wherever you are in life’s journey—parent or child, single or coupled, gay or straight, young or old, regular worshipper or visitor … You are included in our worship and invited to join in our fellowship and witness. (Order of Service Sheet, Cathedral Church of St George, Cape Town, Die Sint George‐Katedraal, Kaapstad, Icaehtedral ka George Ongcwele, Yasekapa, November 2005)

Reconciliation is a matter that takes place on different levels, if it takes place at all. (Dodson, 2000, p. 265)

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Dino Murtic, Kasia Jaworski and Martine Hawkes as well as to all the participants in the Australian Research Council ‘Rethinking Reconciliation and Pedagogy in Unsettling Times’ project, namely Rob Hattam, Peter Bishop, Pam Christie and Pal Ahluwalia.

Notes

1. Interestingly the Castle of Good Hope’s Military Museum in Cape Town makes no distinction about the troops that constituted the Imperial Army in the Boer War and which included troops from Canada, New Zealand, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and India (Australian War Memorial, n.d.). The Australian Forces receive no particular mention, yet in Australia’s war history and major war memorial, the Australian War Memorial, in the capital city Canberra, the Anglo‐Boer War (1899–1902) is given some prominence and involves very significant military events in Australia’s military and war history. (See Denton, 1981; Bleszynski, 2002; Morant, n.d. on the controversial court martial and execution of ‘Breaker Morant’.) This further underscores the issues of memory and memoria.

2. Ubuntu comes from the Nguni‐based languages of Southern Africa and refers to ‘humaneness’ and community interdependence. It is most commonly translated into English as ‘humanity to others’ and as ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’.

3. Some time later it did offer reparation to over 16,000 people. As with all aspects of the TRC this drew heavy criticism in terms of inadequacy and questions of justice.

4. Initially it was projected that the new body to oversee reconciliation in Australia would be named the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and Justice. Very quickly the ‘justice’ element was removed, thereby signalling to many that reconciliation in Australia was to be symbolic rather than legal and that reparation was not going to be a part of the decade for Reconciliation. In this shift, the commitment to reconciliation was seen by many as side‐stepping the very real and hard issues of sovereignty, land rights and self‐determination.