Selective Silence and the Shaping of Memory in Post-Apartheid Visual Culture: The Case of the Monument to the Women of South Africa

Abstract

This paper focuses on a particular event in South African history and the ways in which the event is memorialised and remembered in post-apartheid South Africa. In her book History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa, Annie Coombes remarks, ‘Women's vital role in the overthrow of the apartheid state has been sorely neglected in favour of a more monolithic representation of the liberation movement’.1 In this paper I consider Coombes's claim in relation to one specific attempt at public memorial after apartheid: the Monument to the Women of South Africa located at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. As the only commemorative site dedicated entirely to women's apartheid-era political efforts, the Monument to the Women of South Africa is of vital importance to the memory of women's role in the struggle; and yet a tension exists between the monument's presence as a feminist site, and its disappearance from public view: the Monument has essentially been invisible to the public for most of its existence, due in part to the inaccessibility of the Union Buildings. The Monument's invisibility not only trivialises the political significance of the Women's March, but is also a distressing act of post-apartheid erasure of women's political agency. I argue that when one considers this alongside the more widespread exclusion of women in post-apartheid commemorative sites, this not only has implications for the telling of history, but may very well affect women's ability, in Cynthia Enloe's words, to ‘sustain an authentic political life in post-war periods’.2

¹A. Coombes, History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 107.

²C. Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 71.

Keywords:

• 1956 Women's March
• monument
• visual culture
• memorial
• memory
• feminism
• women's activism
• public culture
• heroism
• Wilma Cruise
• Noria Mabasa
• art history
• commemoration

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks and appreciation go to several people who read drafts of this essay, including Katha Pollitt; the members of my writing group, Claire Buck, Karen McCormack, Gabriela Torres, and Mary Beth Tierney-Tello; and the anonymous SAHJ reviewers. Thanks, too, to Wilma Cruise for granting permission to include images of her work in this essay.

Notes

¹A. Coombes, History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 107.

²C. Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 71.

³C. Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1992), 129.

⁴For more on the Women's March in particular, and women's anti-pass campaigns in general, see F. Baard as told to B. Schreiner, My Spirit is not Banned (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1986); I. Berger, ‘Generations of Struggle: Trade Unions and the Roots of Feminism, 1930–60’, in N. Gasa, ed., Women in South African History (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007), 185–206; N. Gasa, ‘Feminisms, Motherisms, Patriarchies and Women's Voices in the 1950s’, in Gasa, Women in South African History, 207–229; H. Joseph, Side by Side: The Autobiography of Helen Joseph (Johannesburg: AD Donker, 1986); Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa; J. Wells, We Now Demand! The History of Women's Resistance to Pass Laws in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993).

⁵Brigitte Mabandla, cited in R. Becker, ‘The New Monument to the Women of South Africa’, African Arts, 33, 3 (2000), 1.

⁶L. Callicinos, interview, Johannesburg, 2009.

⁷ L. Callicinos, interview, Johannesburg, 2009.

⁸S. Sack, interview, Johannesburg, 2009.

⁹ S. Sack, interview, Johannesburg, 2009.

¹⁰ Becker, ‘New Monument’; K. Smith, ‘Artists Slighted over Unveiling of Women's Monument’, Artthrob 36 (2000); Coombes, History After Apartheid; S. Marschall ‘Serving Male Agendas: Two National Women's Monuments in South Africa’, Women's Studies, 33, 8 (2004), 1009–1033; and M. Arnold, ‘Visual Culture in Context: The Implications of Union and Liberation’, in M. Arnold and B. Schmahmann, eds, Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa 1910–1994 (London: Ashgate, 2005).

¹¹Becker, ‘New Monument’, 1.

¹²Other scholars have commented on this oversight: Annie Coombes has observed that women's experiences are generally absent within South Africa's post-apartheid public culture: ‘[M]any have felt that women's vital role in the overthrow of the apartheid state has been sorely neglected in favor of a more monolithic representation of the liberation movement’ (Coombes, History After Apartheid, 107). Raymond Suttner has similarly argued that post-apartheid narratives, visual and written, ‘dismiss or downplay the involvement of women in the political struggle’ (R. Suttner 2009, The ANC Underground in South Africa, 1950–1976 (Boulder, Colorado: FirstForumPress, 2009) 124). Nobonisa Gasa writes that women ‘have not been accorded the recognition, acknowledgement, and attention they deserve’ (N. Gasa, ‘Introduction: Basus'iimbokodo, bawel'imilambo New Freedoms and New Challenges, a Continuing Dialogue’, Gasa, Women in South African History, xxiii).

¹³Because I am primarily interested in the role and evidence of art in the question of political agency for women, the implications suggested by this project will, I hope, be relevant to scholars and practitioners interested in integrating the experiences of women into studies of conflict-affected areas more generally. Given that women in several transforming nations continue to struggle to make the dynamics of gender salient, a feminist analysis of the practice of memory work as it relates to the experiences of women in South Africa may very well have relevance for other contemporary contexts.

¹⁴C. Bold, R. Knowles, and B. Leach, ‘Feminist Memorializing and Cultural Countermemory: The Case of Marianne's Park’, Signs, 28, 1 (2002), 125–148.

¹⁵This is, of course, also true of other social movements and/or political positions.

¹⁶Gasa, ‘Introduction’, xvii.

¹⁷P. Govender, Love and Courage: A Story of Insubordination (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2007), 124.

¹⁸S. Hassim, Women's Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 56.

¹⁹Govender, Love and Courage, 137.

²⁰Becker, ‘New Monument’, 6.

²¹W. Cruise, interview via email, July 2009.

²²J. Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten (New York: Anchor, 1977).

²³Gasa, ‘Introduction’, xxvi.

²⁴ Gasa, ‘Introduction’, xxiii.

²⁵C. Higgs, ‘Zenzele: African Women's Self-Help Organizations in South Africa, 1927–1998’, African Studies Review, 47, 3 (2004), 122.

²⁶Mashinini, in C. Higgs, ‘Zenzele: African Women's Self-Help Organizations in South Africa, 1927–1998’, African Studies Review, 47, 3 (2004), 122.

²⁷Higgs, ‘Zenzele’, 122. I have written elsewhere about Zenzele clubs in relation to artistic production, women's activism, and the eradication of poverty in South Africa, specifically among women's cooperatives: K. Miller, ‘Iconographies of Gender, Poverty, and Power in Contemporary South African Visual Culture’, in National Women's Studies Association Journal, (2007), 118–136.

²⁸Higgs, ‘Zenzele’, 130.

²⁹A number of scholars and activists have written about the history of women's initial exclusion from the ANC, and the resistance and sexism that they faced from their male colleagues long after women were formally admitted as ANC members in 1943. Elinor Sisulu, for example, has spoken about the humiliation of being assigned mostly support roles for men, including catering. Indeed, even during the planning stages of the 1956 Women's March, male ANC leaders resisted the very idea, arguing that women did not have the capacity to accomplish such a huge undertaking. Pregs Govender has written forcefully about how sexist practices including the exclusion of women from leadership roles and decision-making processes persisted throughout the struggle, and during the transition to democracy. Describing her work within women's groups that organised against patriarchy in the 1980s, she writes, ‘Many of us believed that women had to be organised against limitations imposed by the state as well as those prescribed by their own comrades in their organisations and homes. Few male leaders, on the other hand, recognised patriarchy as an enemy within our own ranks’ (Govender, Love and Courage, 80). For similar recollections from women activists working within the Black Consciousness Movement, see M. Ramphele, Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader (New York: The Feminist Press, 1996), M. Ramphele, ‘The Dynamics of Gender within Black Consciousness Organizations: A Personal View’, in N.B. Pityan, M. Ramphele, M. Mpumiwana and L. Wilson, eds, Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko & Black Consciousness (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991); D. Magazinger The Law and the Prophets: Faith and Hope in South Africa, 1968–1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); P. Gqola, ‘Contradictory Locations: Black Women and the Discourse of the Black Consciousness movement’, Meridians, 2, 1 (2001), 130–152; and L. Hadfield, ‘Biko, Black Consciousness, and “the System” eZinyoka: Oral History and Black Consciousness in Practice in a Rural Ciskei Village’, South African Historical Journal, 62, 1 (2010) 78–99.

³⁰See Hassim, Ramphele, and Govender to read more about how the ‘feminist agenda of changing the lives of women, especially the poorest, and transforming gendered roles and relationships’ was, and continues to be, a focus for South African feminists (Govender, Love and Courage, 207).

³¹Becker, ‘New Monument’, 6. It should be noted that in Cruise and Holmes's original proposal, their design for the Monument included a figural sculpture of a woman doing precisely this: kneeling on the ground next to the imbokodo. This life-sized figural sculpture would thus have demonstrated the position and gesture of a woman in the process of using the grinding stone; yet,because this element of the Monument was never completed, the imbokodo itself remains the sculptural centre and visual focus of the site.

³²Coombes, History After Apartheid, 106.

³³Z. Wicomb, ‘To Hear the Variety of Discourses’, in M.J. Daymond, ed., South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory, and Criticism, 1990–1994 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 47.

³⁴Z. Mali, personal communication, Boston, 13 April 2009.

³⁵I have written elsewhere about depictions of women's militancy in apartheid-era visual productions, and my forthcoming book will consider the absence of these representations in the post-apartheid period. See K. Miller, ‘Moms with Guns: Women's Political Agency in Anti-Apartheid Visual Culture’, African Arts, 42, 2 (Summer 2009), 68–75.

³⁶Although the March itself was not violent, these repeated references to the possibility of women's militancy are more than just symbolic. Nombonisa Gasa recalls that women grew ‘more and more militant’, particularly in their work within women's organisations in the 1980s (Gasa, ‘Introduction’, xxviii). See also R. Suttner, ‘Women in the ANC-led Underground’, in Gasa, Women in South African History.

³⁷S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 86.

³⁸Luli Callinicos, one of the competition judges, recalls that the jury had a similarly nuanced understanding of the imbokodo when they designed the terms of the competition: ‘when we wrote the brief we pointed out that in the iconic song from the Federation of South African Women, it has far richer meaning than just a rock. Yes, it is something smooth and round, but it also has enduring strength’ (Callinicos, interview).

³⁹As Wilma Cruise notes, the four women who carried and delivered the petitions ‘were heroes because they were doing a treasonable thing’ (interview, Pretoria, November 2009). This element of risk is typically not mentioned, or recalled, in the context of the Women's March.

⁴⁰ Bold et al., ‘How Might a Women's Monument be Different?’, 32.

⁴¹W. Cruise and M. Holmes, ‘Monument to the Women of South Africa’, submission, (November 1999).

⁴²Becker, ‘New Monument’, 4.

⁴³P. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire [1984]’, Representations, 26, (Spring 1989), 7.

⁴⁴E. Salo, ‘South African Feminisms: A Coming of Age’, in A. Basu, ed., The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women's Movements in Global Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 129.

⁴⁵ Cruise, interview, 2009.

⁴⁶See, for example, individuals cited by Coombes, History After Apartheid, 108 and Marschall, ‘Serving Male Agendas’, 1020–1022.

⁴⁷ Seidman, interview, Johannesburg, 2009.

⁴⁸In 2002, the Department of Arts, Culture, Science, and Technology divided into two separate departments: the Department of Arts and Culture (DAC), and the Department of Science and Technology.

⁴⁹Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, the selection committee received (and rejected) a number of submissions which relied on more mainstream and hierarchical notions of heroism. For example, one applicant proposed creating traditional bronze busts of the women leaders. As Luli Callinicos remarked, this would have been an ‘absurd way to commemorate such a broad-based, collaborative political effort’ (Callinicos, interview, 2009).

⁵⁰Sack, interview, 2009.

⁵¹ Sack, interview, 2009.

⁵²Cruise and Holmes, ‘Monument to the Women of South Africa’.

⁵³ Cruise and Holmes, ‘Monument to the Women of South Africa’, 1.

⁵⁴A. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 40.

⁵⁵I.S. Okoye, ‘The Limits of Representation?’, Art Journal, 66 (2007), 114.

⁵⁶Sack, interview, 2009.

⁵⁷Coombes, History After Apartheid, 111.

⁵⁸Sack, interview, 2009.

⁵⁹Becker, ‘New Monument’, 4.

⁶⁰Sack, interview, 2009.

⁶¹R. Phillips, ‘Settler Monuments, Indigenous Memory: Dis-membring and Re-membering Canadian Art History’, in R. Nelson and M. Olin, eds, Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 281.

⁶² R. Phillips, ‘Settler Monuments, Indigenous Memory: Dis-membring and Re-membering Canadian Art History’, in R. Nelson and M. Olin, eds, Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 281.

⁶³Creating works based on dreams also allows Mabasa to assert herself and defy rigid gender norms that are particular to artists in her community: ‘[Mabasa] preferred to execute her ‘dream’ visions as woodcarvings, a task customarily undertaken by men in her community’ (J. Nolte, ‘Narratives of Migration in the Works of Noria Mabasa and Mmakgabo Sebidi’, in M. Arnold and B. Schmahmann, eds, Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa 1910–1994 (London: Ashgate, 2005), 179).

⁶⁴Sack, interview, 2009.

⁶⁵ Sack, interview, 2009.

⁶⁶Gasa, ‘Feminisms, Motherisms, Patriarchies and Women's Voices’, 229, note 2.

⁶⁷Nombonisa Gasa considers this broad-based collaboration to be one of the most important characteristics of the 1956 Women's March. She writes, ‘its significance lies in what it achieved: bringing together women from such diverse backgrounds, and registering women's objections as women (and on so large a scale) to the encroachment of the state on all aspects of African women's lives. The march is also significant for the manner in which it was organised, by women of different races, ideological backgrounds and social strata. There were Communist women, churchwomen, trade unionists, African nationalists, the peasantry, the upper middle class of black and white South Africa, rubbing shoulders, brought together by a common cause – the demands of women to have the passes removed. African women were not going to carry them’ (Gasa, ‘Feminisms, Motherisms, Patriarchies and Women's Voices’, 220).

⁶⁸S. Sack, interview, Johannesburg, July 2009.

⁶⁹Arnold , ‘Visual Culture in Context’, 24.

⁷⁰Before it was called the National Cultural History Museum, the NCHM was known as the African Window Museum. In 2010 it underwent another name change, and is now the Ditsong National Museum of Cultural History of South Africa. Yet, many individuals and on-line search engines continue to refer to it as the African Window Museum, further complicating the circumstances when one is trying to locate a work of art. Furthermore, the NCHM is perhaps the least predictable home for a sculpture by an artist of Mabasa's prestige, given that it is not a fine arts museum, but rather, houses mostly anthropological, archaeological, and natural history collections.

⁷¹ Nora, 1989: 19.

⁷²My forthcoming book contextualises this and other visual productions within the wider field of post apartheid visual culture and contemporary memory practices, and provides a deeper analysis of visual tributes that are dedicated to women, including museum exhibitions, architecture, photography, and cooperative textile work.

⁷³Four of the fourty sites were never completed. Each of the incomplete sites was to be dedicated to an individual male.

⁷⁴C. Saunders, ‘Memorializing Freedom Struggles’, Safundi, 9, 3 (2008), 340.

⁷⁵ C. Saunders, ‘Memorializing Freedom Struggles’, Safundi, 9, 3 (2008), 340.

⁷⁶Enloe, Curious Feminist, 199–200.

⁷⁷Becker, ‘New Monument’, 4.

⁷⁸M. Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women: Stories of the South African Transition (Natal: University of Kwazulu Natal Press, 2007), 6.

⁷⁹Enloe, Curious Feminist, 71.

⁸⁰B. Goldblatt and S. Meintjes, ‘Women: One Chapter in the History of South Africa? A Critique of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report’, Conference Paper for The Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Commissioning the Past (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand, June 1999), 4.