Cynthia Kros

Telling Lies and then Hoping to Forget all about History

Potentially the new school curriculum known as Curriculum 2005 offers students an expanded repertoire of knowledge and creative ways to overcome the old, staid subject divisions. There is much in Curriculum 2005 to quicken the pulse of the progressive educator. But History, I will argue, may well be one of the casualties of the new curriculum. Curriculum 2005 has had a rather scathing press to date and I think it deserves to be taken more seriously, both so that we can assess its value and so that, where necessary we can take the necessary evasive action, especially as regards our discipline.’ Curriculum 2005 ought to be seen in a much fuller historical context than is generally the case and its contradictory impulses acknowledged. In the course of considering its multiple parentage we may come to a clearer understanding of why History offers challenges to certain vested interests and how, fully rehabilitated, it might go about helping us to come to terms with a past disfigured in more ways than even Fanon in his reflections on the mutilation of history by the colonists probably thought possible.’ The article which follows demands quite a complicated, difficult and even paradoxical defence ofthe content of History.

Public History/Heritage: Translation, Transgression or More of the Same?1

This article is a reflection of the trajectory of heritage or public history since the path breaking History Workshop conference titled ‘Myths, Monuments, Museums: New Premises?’ The article briefly revisits some of the arguments made at the 1992 conference, particularly those that related to the fate of heritage representations crafted during apartheid. The Voortrekker Monument provides a path into discussion about the possibilities opened after 1994 for transformation of old heritage sites and the ways in which such sites have been reappropriated by new hegemonic political discourse, which has some disturbing resemblances to the old one.

Rhodes must fall : archives and counter-archives

Abstract This article takes its departure point from the fact that the VIADUCT 2015 platform overlapped chronologically with the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign at the University of Cape Town (UCT). I ask whether bringing some of the archival theory that was discussed and applied at the platform to bear on an analysis of the campaign against the statue of Rhodes at UCT – in conjunction with the existing literature around monuments – is helpful in deepening understandings of the campaign. After singling out some of the most interesting literature on monuments and monumental iconoclasm, I explore the ways in which Derridean- and Foucauldian-inspired readings of the archive might be applied to the colonial memorial landscape. I propose that the campaign was sustained by a substantial archive of iconoclasm, and that the protesters consciously tried to extend and elaborate on the archive/counter-archive.

Secularity in a world ‘torn by difference’: A consideration of the French headscarf affair from South Africa

Abstract This paper attempts to raise questions about the model of multiculturalism that is the ideal in South African state schools, by examining the debates around secularity in the public space that came to a head in France in 2003, which have very different philosophical and historical antecedents from those that inform South African principles. The paper focuses on the arguments made by members of the Stasi commission, convened by president Chirac in mid 2003, to make recommendations about the continuing viability of secularity (la laïcité) in contemporary France.

Lives in the Making: The Possibilities and Impossibilities of Autobiography with Reference to the Case of Amina Cachalia

Abstract This article takes the authors recent experiences of working with Amina Cachalia on her memoirs as a starting point for engaging with the knotty problems of the autobiographical genre, especially in its relationship with more orthodox forms of history writing. An examination of South African womens autobiographies and memoirs suggests the existence of different kinds of historical narratives that subvert, either explicitly or tacitly, what Elaine Unterhalter drew attention to as the ‘heroic masculine’ narrative commonly told by male South African autobiographers.

Acting Up against Apartheid: Listening to the Market Theatre Archive

ABSTRACT This article arose out of an exercise designed to consolidate the Market Theatre archive under the auspices of Historical Papers at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). It was called “Acting Up against Apartheid”. In the course of locating and collating documentation related to the Market Theatre in the struggle years, Vanessa Cooke and Carol Preston interviewed 17 of the practitioners who were involved in the Market Theatre at the time. Cooke speculated that because the interviewees were long-term colleagues of hers and they had been through the struggle years in the theatre together, they spoke to her in a kind of insider language and used particular narrative strategies. Drawing on a literature that demonstrates the benefits of listening to interviewees attentively, while pointing out several inadequacies of written transcripts, the authors argue that there is much to learn from the interviews, both about the respondents’ story-telling techniques and their understanding of apartheid.

Introduction: Repairing the Legacies of Harm

The focus of this component of the South African Historical Journal arises from a project called ‘Repairing the Legacies of Harm’ initiated in 2014 at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) by Cynthia Kros and David Wilkins. It took its title from the latter’s newly completed PhD thesis on the legacies of transatlantic slavery and the questions posed about how to repair damage that is still deeply felt in communities of slave descendants, and which, arguably still has a major deleterious impact on the political economy of African countries. Wilkins had begun his consideration by entering into the deeply contested field of reparations. Essentially he had argued for reparations being organised in the form of recognising the hurt that was and continues to be done by deeply entrenched racism and structural inequalities, and moving towards an attitudinal amelioration through particular representational and pedagogical strategies. Terming this process historical truth telling, Wilkins’ argument was informed by the approach of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and explored developments in museums and educational curricula concerning transatlantic slavery in Britain, the US and the international trends illustrated by the UNESCO Slave Route Project. Collaborating with Cynthia Kros on a project which explored the legacies of slavery in South Africa offered an opportunity to further explore the reparative potential of processes of historical truth telling. In South Africa it has been evident for some time that the teaching of apartheid inaugurated by the post-1994 schools curriculum as part of a conscious effort to educate learners about the injustices of the past and to be sensitive to their legacies has proved challenging. Information from participants in the teachers’ workshops hosted at Wits by the History Workshop, and research conducted by Chana Teeger for her doctoral thesis suggest many teachers fear its potentially divisive impact in classrooms where painful racially based feelings lie just below the surface. This anxiety seems to hover over the teaching even of more distant histories, like that of Cape slavery. The ‘Repairing the Legacies of Harm’ project sought to stimulate dialogue within the humanities at the university about the history and legacy of slavery at the Cape, as well as forms of coerced labour further north. The hope was that ultimately we would be able to take a productive discussion about the lasting impact of the harms originating from deep history (that is pre-apartheid) into amore public sphere. Our sense of the urgency of this task was heightened

Teaching the Past in All Its ‘Messiness’: Slavery in the Grade 7 Curriculum

Abstract The title of this article is inspired by Peter Novicks injunction in his The Holocaust and Collective Memory (2001) to allow for encounters with the past in all its ‘messiness’, as a way of helping school learners to develop life-long habits of autonomous thinking, reasoning and working both systematically and imaginatively through evidence that might assist them in making difficult ethical choices. The article analyses one aspect of the current Grade 7 curriculum in South Africa, namely slavery at the Cape. It then proceeds, by following up on one of the items in the curriculum to imagine an age-appropriate way of exploring, with the aid of a Collingwood notion of re-enactment, the brutal ideology of paternalism that several South African historians have argued was central to the maintenance, not only of slavery, but also later systems of labour control and reproduction.

Twenty years of heritage studies – the showbiz of history?

Abstract This paper is part of a collective retrospective convened in 2014 looking back at various disciplines in the Humanities at Wits over the 20 years of democracy. The seeds of the heritage studies programme at Wits were sown in 1990 when it became apparent that the apartheid regime was about to cede to a more democratic regime, creating a new opportunity for Wits academics to engage with public institutions. The paper discusses this moment against the background of the History Workshop at Wits, which hosted some of the discussions about public culture in the early 1990s. It attempts to elucidate the origins of the heritage studies programme at the university and describe some of its features. The paper follows the migration of the programme from Social Sciences to the Wits School of Arts, outlining some of the philosophical ramifications of its relocation.

The Nature of Heritage: The New South Africa

In the period during which I was reading Lynn Meskell’s Nature of Heritage, I found myself rambling through Kirstenbosch Gardens on a weekday morning and was seized with a deep ambivalence. My view from the new arboreal walk named after the highly venomous Boomslang, presumably for its tree proclivity and sinuous sway rather than potentially deadly qualities, made me particularly conscious of two things. One, from the Boomslang you can see where the verdant forest meets the Southern Suburbs, Claremont in particular looking indistinct and innocuous in the morning mist on the day I was there, belying its history of forced removals. Two, as I passed other Boomslang promenaders, I was also obliged to acknowledge my demographic representativity. No matter how I tried to distinguish myself through the private knowledge that I was capturing data for this review, I knew that a long shot of the Boomslang would show me as a white person of a certain age in a gently swaying procession of other white people of a similar generational cohort. It made me feel that Kirstenbosch was made for us and the American tourists I could hear approaching from below and, although I could not help delighting in the views of the spring flowers and the luxuriant spread of trees and shrubs, I felt the sting of Meskell’s exposé of what passes for natural heritage in South Africa. Notice, her title is intended to provoke immediate suspicion of the idea that heritage in the ‘new’ South Africa is natural – even when we are talking about Kirstenbosch on a glorious October morning or the Kruger National Park, which is Meskell’s subject. As she explains in some detail in the first chapter, current ideas about ‘nature’ derive from a long European and North American tradition. In fact, Kirstenbosch is dotted with clues as to the artifice of its nature. One of the most striking is the epitaph on the tombstone of Henry Harold Welch Pearson, the Professor of Botany at the South African College in Cape Town who is credited with founding the Kirstenbosch we know today. With an arrogance that would have taken Percy Bysshe Shelley’s breath away could he have seen how a century after he had penned his Ozymandias as a cautionary tale for men with monumental pretensions, Pearson’s admirers had – with the phrase –‘If ye seek his Monument look around’ – sought to annex the entire estate in perpetuity. The disturbing thing is that, almost another century later, there is little to suggest that they were foolish to be so presumptuous. At the foot of the Boomslang we are told quite plainly that the ‘Arboretum is not a natural forest but a planted one’. It turns out, according to this notice that the visitor has to look hard in the vicinity for any remnants of the natural forest thanks to the depredations of the East India Company and, no doubt, its successors. There is a passing reference to the South African Historical Journal, 2015 Vol. 67, No. 1, 95–105, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2014.993689