The cost of history
Contestations over South Africa’s heritage have resurged with the emergence of #RhodesMustFall and the debate over the place of the Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town in 2015.
Removing colonial heritage in the form of names and statues is often easy enough. However, what is harder is to grapple with the economics of heritage, where there is often a link between settler-colonial built heritage, tourism, and property markets.
It is clear that fights over settler-colonial heritage become intense not merely because of the emotional attachment of settler descendants to that heritage, but because of the major commercial spinoffs that it provides to certain segments of business and propertied classes.
In Rhini, there is a very clear link between the settlercolonial housing town architecture and the broader commercial branding of the town. If you take a look at any marketing images of Rhini, they invariably draw on the “quaint” settler-style feel of parts of the town as being the most distinctive characteristic that the town has to offer tourists.
When Rhodes University, one of the largest economic agents in the town, markets itself, it tends to rely on the quaint, “small colonial town” aesthetic to make the town attractive to prospective employees
This “quaint” imaging of Rhini is of course misleading. First, because it portrays the more affluent part of the town, there is very little imaging that represents the townships (usually images of Makanaskop are used).
Second, Rhini is not quaint – the suburbanites are extremely racist, the apartheid geography of the town is largely intact, unemployment and poverty is high, muggings and house break-ins are commonplace, and affordable decent housing either to buy or rent is in short supply no matter in which part of the town you are looking.
In spite of these actual realities, the settler-colonial aesthetic will continue to dominate representations of Rhini because those who exploit it are very active and dominant in business and are unlikely to contribute towards decolonising representations of the city.
Over the years, there have been some attempts to balance out these representa- tions through the development of heritage concepts such as the history of Makana kaNxele the prophet warrior and the 1819 Battle of Grahamstown by the Egazini project and others.
The Egazini project made one of the strongest contributions in decolonising the 1820 Settler meta-narrative from heritage narratives of Rhini. Although the project is now defunct, it provides a strong model for how active heritage production through artistic and oral history work can very quickly become absorbed into the local heritage economy, public narratives and representations of Rhini.
What the Egazini model showed is that in thinking through the creation of heritage, we must recognise that heritage is not a “thing” or an “object” or “artefact” to be put in a museum but is in fact a dynamic range of inheritances from the past – oral histories, artistic styles, cultural memory, landscapes, language, indigenous knowledge, music – everything.
All these can be brought together creatively and purposefully to produce more representative narratives and representations of local heritage.
But even once these “decolonial” heritages are brought to the fore, there has to be quite lot of thinking put into what will and will not work in different communities. For example, the Egazini monument has been vandalised, and can no longer be part of local tourist routes in the township. Red Location museum in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth has also been vandalised and closed due to residents stating that they felt they derived no benefit from it.
This says to me that decolonising heritage landscapes is tricky – it is about more than symbols, but also about tangible benefit.
To expect local communities to accept new heritage simply because it “decolonises” is a little like putting your head in the sand and hoping for the best.
In this regard, there has to be a lot of technical and business thinking about tourism markets, employment creation and skills training infused together in decolonising of heritage.
In other words, while the politics of decolonising seems relatively straightforward, the steps towards building a heritage economy that works for all requires much more rigour and training.
• Nomalanga Mkhize is a graduate of both Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town. She teaches history at Rhodes. She comments regularly on local and national issues.