Fire destroys -- but it can also forge tools to build the future
The burning of colonial symbols sought to sweep away relics of the old order, writes Njabulo Ndebele. Now for the subtler, more difficult work of constructing the new
‘THEY are burning memory!” This is what I said to myself in my unmediated first reaction to the TV coverage of the burning of portraits of historical figures and other commemorative objects by protesting students at the University of Cape Town earlier this year.
By the time I had downloaded some images from the internet, my reactions had become a little more mediated.
One of the images that struck me was that of a plaque commemorating Jan Smuts. The inscription readable in the light of the flames making their way towards it.
“Jan Christiaan Smuts,” it read, “1870-1950 ‘His life was gentle, and the Elements/So mixt in him that Nature might stand up,/And say to all the world: This was a man.” And then in two languages: “ERECTED BY THE PEOPLE OF THE CAPE. OPGERIG DEUR DIE MENSE VAN KAAPLAND.”
The grandeur of a Shakespearean quote, enlisted to commemorate the life of a man described as a British Commonwealth statesman, military leader and philosopher, was about to be consumed by hostile fire.
Two historic periods seemed to stare at each other in that moment, some 100m below Jameson Hall.
On the one hand Smuts, the second prime minister of South Africa, regardless of the complex history of his leadership, stood representing a history of conquest that finally ended in 1994.
On the other hand stood one of the nascent moments of another period of history in South Africa, begun in 1994 and still confronting the unfolding complexities of its own beginnings.
The young of this period, circling a bonfire of their making, were asking questions about Smuts, whose legacy, they said, retained a power still so overwhelming it seemed to snuff out the possibilities of their own future.
They were unable “to breathe”, they said, suffocating in the legacy of “whiteness” whose grandeur to them was equal to the ashes that the plaque was about to become.
In the unfolding events it became clearer that the incineration of collected “white” and “colonial” objects as embodiments of “whiteness” was the onset of a declared process to “decolonise” UCT.
They sought to rid it of aspects of its legacy that made for a campus environment in which those for whom such a legacy was not built found it impossible “to breathe”.
Thus the pictorial memory of “whiteness”, an attribute of imperialism and colonialism in this part of the world, would symbolically and practically be devoured by fire and be reduced to ashes, its visual presence erased, and its historicity rendered invisible.
It remains to be seen whether total erasure is possible. Human memory exists independently of its physical representations. You will find it in the realms of mind and imagination. In my book, total erasure is not possible. But what people do with such commemorative representations — setting them up, removing them, destroying them — is part of the story of human history.
“Without memory it would virtually be impossible to learn,” wrote Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. “We could not learn from experience, because experience is something remembered. I would forever have to start at the beginning, not realising that a hot stove invariably burns the hand placed on it. What I know is what I remember, and that helps to make me who I am.”
These remarkable words Tutu wrote in his foreword to a book titled Reflections in Prison, published in 2001. It is as if this godly man wrote these words for me to help me think through a difficult subject of our times.
So, when student activists drive onto a campus with tyres and litres of petrol and later a bonfire is made of paintings and photographs, what are the memories that made them who they were at the precise moment that their fire consumed artefacts of people they deemed representatives of something disagreeable from the past?
What is it that they learnt, and what is the context in which that learning took place, that led them to that moment of cognition, to feel compelled to take the action they did?
What was the connection between who they were, or thought they were, and who they envisaged they would be after the act of burning? What was the memory of the past whose representations were being burnt and the future that would rise out of the ashes?
At the heart of the call for the “decolonisation” of UCT was a more elemental source of student disaffection: being “black” in a “white” world. The #RhodesMustFall movement projected “blackness” as a critical element in the discourse of protest against the “whiteness” of Rhodes’s legacy and the resilient effects of that legacy.
The “black body in pain” needed to be affirmed as human against its dehumanising depreciation as exploited labour over more than a century of captured service to Rhodes’s imperial, capitalist vision and the rampantly racist view of the world that drove that vision.
Today, “black” students in “historically black universities” are comparatively less vocal, as “blacks”, than those at “historically white institutions”. The matter of numbers and the capacity to define space for self-expression seems a factor that requires greater understanding.
It is time to recognise that the norm of human presence in South Africa is “black”. That recognition is central to understanding where real agency for shaping the future of South Africa is overwhelmingly located, and where “blackness” becomes so normal it ceases to exist.
Since the bonfire of art works at UCT, fire as a weapon of protest has spread throughout the higher education system, and rekindled beyond. And so, when the portraits of the “colonials” have been burnt, the timeless questions remain: what is the future of the townships? What is the link between that future and schools and universities? What is the link between Sandton and Alexandra?
When will the fires be tamed, and what will it take to tame them, so that new art work can be forged, new industries created and inventions forged to meet the needs of a people in intimate dialogue with their new world?
What will it take to tame the fire, and to remember that fire can be a companion to invention? To understand that for fire to play its companion role, those who use it are required to bring a lot more thought, a lot more rigour in their thinking, a lot more thoughtful detail in their doing, a lot more investment in time and focus to understand the rich complexity of people living in the social realm? To meet head-on the challenge of thought and imagination stretching across time into the centuries ahead, with South Africa emerging as a successful democracy?
These are questions I leave you with.
Ndebele is chancellor of the University of Johannesburg . This is an edited extract from the 10th annual Helen Joseph lecture he gave there on September 14
The pictorial memory of ‘whiteness’ would symbolically and practically be devoured by fire It is time to recognise that the norm of human presence in South Africa is ‘black’