Ciraj Rassool

The 1952 Jan Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival: Constructing and Contesting Public National History in South Africa

For all approaches to the South African past the icon of Jan Van Riebeeck looms large. Perspectives supportive of the political project of white domination created and perpetuate the icon as the bearer of civilization to the sub-continent and its source of history. Opponents of racial oppression have portrayed Van Riebeeck as public (history) enemy number one of the South African national past. Van Riebeeck remains the figure around which South Africas history is made and contested. But this has not always been the case. Indeed up until the 1950s, Van Riebeeck appeared only in passing in school history texts, and the day of his landing at the Cape was barely commemorated. From the 1950s, however, Van Riebeeck acquired centre stage in South Africas public history. This was not the result of an Afrikaner Nationalist conspiracy but arose out of an attempt to create a settler nationalist ideology. The means to achieve this was a massive celebration throughout the country of the 300th anniversary of Van Riebeecks landing. Here was an attempt to display the growing power of the apartheid state and to assert its confidence. A large festival fair and imaginative historical pageants were pivotal events in establishing the paradigm of a national history and constituting its key elements. The political project of the apartheid state was justified in the festival fair through the juxtaposition of ‘civilization’ and economic progress with ‘primitiveness’ and social ‘backwardness’. The historical pageant in the streets of Cape Town presented a version of South Africas past that legitimated settler rule. Just as the Van Riebeeck tercentenary afforded the white ruling bloc an opportunity to construct an ideological hegemony, it was grasped by the Non-European Unity Movement and the African National Congress to launch political campaigns. Through the public mediums of the resistance press and the mass meeting these organizations presented a counter-history of South Africa. These oppositional forms were an integral part of the making of the festival and the Van Riebeeck icon. In the conflict which played itself out in 1952 there was a remarkable consensus about the meaning of Van Riebeecks landing in 1652. The narrative constructed, both by those seeking to establish apartheid and those who sought to challenge it, represented Van Riebeeck as the spirit of apartheid and the originator of white domination. The ideological frenzy in the centre of Cape Town in 1952 resurrected Van Riebeeck from obscurity and historical amnesia to become the lead actor on South Africas public history stage.

Power, Knowledge and the Politics of Public Pasts

This article examines the ways in which the disciplines of history and archaeology in South Africa relate and how they have negotiated the public as part of their disciplinary practices of producing knowledge about the past that is accessible. It presents an analysis of questions of knowledge and power, and the different ways that scholars working broadly as ‘historians’ or ‘archaeologists’ have viewed the relationship between expertise and ‘community’. It is also about how relations of expertise have been negotiated within and across these fields, and particularly how those relations of expertise have been contested. This is done through an analysis of the varied social history research and efforts at popularisation of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand, as well as the forms of public engagement on the part of public archaeologists in the District Six Museum and in Khoisan rock art research. The article also analyses the District Six Museum in Cape Town as a space of emerging expertise in the field of public history, whose practice and experience demonstrates the possibilities and limits of transcending relations of knowledge characterised by a politics of paternalism and atonement, in which public scholarship is limited to relations of outreach. The article is concerned to understand the possibilities of decentring and relocating expertise outside the academy.

Rethinking Documentary History and South African Political Biography

ABSTRACT South African political biography has largely reproduced a ‘biographical illusion’ by approaching political lives as characterised by an ordered sequence of acts, events and works, with individuals characterised by stability, autonomy, self-determination and rational choice. The concerns of this approach have been to construct national histories in which leaders have been made to speak as national subjects through resistance history. The documentary collections of Thomas Karis, Gwendolen Carter, Gail Gerhart, Sheridan Johns and Allison Drew connected political leaders’ public lives to the high politics of resistance institutions. In the same vein, the work of documentary narration by Gail Gerhart, John Hendricks, Joshua Lazerson, Catherine Higgs and Steven Gish presented accounts of resistance through notions of leadership and biography which privileged the national political formation and the chronological lives of national political leaders. What occurred in this research was a ‘double’ or ‘compound modernism’, involving an encounter between modernist historical methods and the modernist imaginaries of political institutions and national or local leaders. This article shows how it may be possible to approach political biography and resistance history in new ways, through a focus on biographical production, biographical relations, the cultural politics of lives and institutions, and the idea of biographic contestation. Biographic research can be approached through questions about the conditions and relations through which biographic narratives came to be produced. In this way it is possible to open up analytical spaces in the academy and institutions of public history, for furthering biographic representation beyond modernism.

Making the District Six Museum in Cape Town1

Ciraj Rassool is professor of history at the University of the Western Cape, where he also directs the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies. He is a trustee of the District Six Museum and the Chairperson of the Scientific Committee of the International Council of African Museums (AFRICOM). He has written extensively in the fields of museum studies, heritage, visual history and resistance historiography.

Family Stories or a Group Portrait? South Africa on Display at the KIT Tropenmuseum, 2002–2003: The Making of an Exhibition

This article examines the making of a temporary exhibition, Familieverhalen uit Zuid-Afrika (South African Family Stories) that was installed at the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT) Tropenmuseum (Royal Tropical Institute Museum) in Amsterdam in 2002–2003. It does so in the context of collecting and exhibitionary histories at the Tropenmuseum and its recent attempts to reframe its ethnographic legacies. Familieverhalen is analysed through its team-based processes of production, the social discourses in which it was embedded and its efforts to construct a museum public in the Netherlands. This article argues that despite the aspirations to present complex South African social histories through nine families and their shifting identities, on their own terms, the exhibition may have implicitly relied on some of the racial and ethnic categories it sought to disavow.

Rethinking Empire in Southern Africa

This special issue on the ‘South African empire’ evolved from the South African empire research project, the origins of which lie in the discomfort of a number of historians of Namibia with dominant characteristics of the treatment of Namibia within the main lines of South African historiography. South African historians, they felt, failed to understand the importance of South Africa’s only colony, South West Africa/Namibia, and that this was an expression of the reproduction of what seemed like the codes and conventions of a continuing imperial repertoire of South Africa itself. The necessity and relevance of bringing into question some of the core assumptions of South African historiography were confirmed when the limited debate about the second volume of the new Cambridge History of South Africa, on the 20th century, published in 2011, took root. Namibia acquired the status of a non-place in this authoritative work, as such proving the point that South Africa is seldom theorised as having been a colonial state attempting to build an empire. The South African empire project, conducted through a series of workshops and forums held in Basel, Cape Town, Windhoek and Uppsala between 2009 and 2013, and an international conference, ‘Re-Figuring the South African Empire’, confirmed a deeply felt predicament about the audacity of de facto and conceptual neglect (one would almost call it denialism) on part of the South African historiography of South Africa’s 75-year-long colonial rule over Namibia. This trend seems to be symptomatic of a bigger structural and ideological failure by the South African state to acknowledge either colonisation or decolonisation.

Re-storing the Skeletons of Empire: Return, Reburial and Rehumanisation in Southern Africa

This article argues that empire should be understood not only as geography or network, but also as extractive, hierarchical and stratified relations of knowledge, where the modern museum emerged as one of its key institutions and primary sites. The focus of this examination of empire as epistemology is the process of the return of the remains of Klaas and Trooi Pienaar to South Africa for reburial in 2012, seen in relation to other return processes under way from South African museums to the Northern Cape and Namibia. These are analysed through a wider understanding of South Africas multiple colonialisms, as colonised and coloniser, and in relation to the history of the Trans-/Garieb transfrontier region, which, by the early 20th century, had been marked by colonial violence and the dispersal of its people across colonial borders. The plunder of graves in this region conducted in the name of scientific collecting formed the basis of the South Africanisation of science, through which the flows of human remains and artefacts began to be directed to South African museums in the service of a special South African concentration on ‘living fossils’, as they competed with their European counterparts. Through an insatiable and competitive collecting history at this time, the remains of so-called primitive people and their artefacts and records ended up in museums and archives in Vienna. They also became the founding collections of at least two museums in South Africa, the newly formed McGregor Museum in Kimberley and the modernising South African Museum in Cape Town. This article tracks the experience, debates and challenges of the repatriation of the remains of the Pienaars as a process of ‘rehumanisation’, disinterred, transported and stored as artefacts, and returned as the remains of citizens and subjects of history. It asks what implications this repatriation holds for the future for the modern museum itself, marked as it has been by a ‘denial of coevalness’.

‘Fields of Play’: the District Six Museum and the history of football in Cape Town 1

This article examines the distinctive features of the District Six Museum’s memory work on the history and heritage of apartheid forced removals in Cape Town, and shows how these approaches were applied in the museum to a project through which a new exhibition on the history of football in Cape Town was created. Since its inception in December 1994, the District Six Museum has become one of the most prominent examples of new museums whose methods of work are based on participation, annunciation and inscription, and a model of memory work based upon the idea of knowledge ‘transaction’. The practice of the District Six Museum poses challenges for conventional museum methods both in South Africa and internationally. In 2008, the exhibition ‘Fields of Play’ was produced by the District Six Museum, after three years of collection and focus group work which drew upon these participatory methods. While excitement about the 2010 World Cup – the first to be held on African soil – was reaching fever pitch in South Africa, the District Six Museum created a complex exhibition of the history of football in Cape Town in relation to the spatial patterns of removal and displacement under apartheid. The exhibition showed how football became an arena for holding on to the past, for embracing and displaying the resources of modernity, and for acting out modes of citizenship. This article shows how the District Six Museum’s exhibition went beyond conventional sports exhibitions such as the hall of fame and those created for the purposes of marketing and public relations.

Visualizing the game: global perspectives on football in Africa 1

Football, in many ways, is a visual endeavour. From the visual experience within the stadium itself to worldwide media representations, from advertisements to football art and artefacts, football is much about seeing and being seen; about watching, making visual and being visualized; about representing and being represented. At all levels of the game, ranging from a FIFA World Cup final to an ordinary youth soccer game played on the street, football is a profoundly visual experience. One of the formal elements of the game relates to the visual landscape of the street or pitch, and players arranged in formations of defence and attack, with attention to the geometries of passing, crossing and the offside rule. Good players are spoken of as possessing ‘vision’, in being able to visualize the patterns of play and likely trajectories of the ball. Football is also enjoyed by viewers, either arranged simply as a crowd or, more formally, as supporters who are assigned different sections of the stadium. These spectators are either hardened fans, who are armed with an arsenal of supporters’ accoutrements and visual markers of partisanship and attentive to vocal or performative rituals of support, or are spectators interested in the more artistic and skilful aspects of the game. The game is a spectacle, played in order to be viewed. The viewing is both a witnessing of a victory, draw or defeat and an occasion for visual pleasure, as an experience of the arts and aesthetics of football. In turn, some footballers play ‘for the crowd’, engaging in showboating, skilled dribbling and trickery, often at the expense of either progress towards scoring a goal or getting a yellow card, for example for removing their shirt. Occasionally, the crowd momentarily departs in unison from the narrative of the match, engaging in its own pleasure of solidarity and comradeship, such as in a Mexican wave weaving its path around the stadium. Moreover, the game today is part of a global, transnational cultural economy of young migrant players, agents, branding and celebrity that is characterized by an intensely visualized fandom of club colours, flags and banners, and a world of advertising on electronic boards surrounding the stadium and often digitally on the field itself. Football’s visuality has been completely changed to suit an age of mass media and satellite live broadcasting, as the game’s viewership is multiplied and transferred into living rooms, bars and public squares around the world, as