How virus has changed the world
Why are there so few public statues of historical female achievers? Is it that subjects are thin on the ground, or that erecting monumental statues is itself a very male thing — or is there something else going on, asks Sue de Groot
If it took only a month to carve a monumental statue, perhaps there would be more stone tributes to historic female figures in SA. Every August, to mark “women’s month”, sculptors could turn their chisels to women.
But it is not lack of time on the part of artists that has created a dearth of women in the world of statuary. Nor is their absence entirely due to a lack of interest. Other forces — financial, political and cultural — have contributed to the glaring absence of granite grannies and marble mothers on public plinths.
SA is not the only country with a gender imbalance in historical statues, nor are we by any means the worst.
According to Look Up London, in the UK only 2.7% of statues show women who aren’t either mythical, royalty or religious figures. The US is no better. In 2011, the Washington Post reported that of the estimated
5,193 public statues across the US, only 394 were of women. In all of New York, there were only five public statues of historic women: Joan of Arc, Golda Meir, Gertrude Stein, Eleanor Roosevelt and Harriet Tubman.
Until recently, the only solo women sculptures in New York’s Central Park were fictional characters: Mother Goose and Alice in Wonderland. But in 2016 a group called “Where Are the Women” led a successful campaign to have statues of women’s rights pioneers Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton installed in the park. So women now make up about 8% of the historic statues in the park, which is an improvement on zero.
In SA, more statues to women have been commissioned and erected since 2006 than previously existed in the entire country. Those that were there before that date include the Vrouemonument in Bloemfontein, Jan van Riebeeck’s wife Maria, the Voortrekker Woman in Pretoria and five statues, in different cities, of Queen Victoria.
Apart from Port Elizabeth’s Queen Victoria, who is fairly regularly vandalised, most notably in 2010 and 2015, these female monuments have not been targeted by iconoclasts in the same way that male figures such as Cecil John Rhodes have. This might be because women are not taken seriously as leaders or representatives of their time and therefore their likenesses are not worth vandalising, or it might be out of some subliminal respect for symbolic women — not always shown to the flesh-and-blood kind — that keeps angry youths from violating them. Maybe the literal presence of a pedestal is a reminder of female dignity.
Around the world, too, it is male statues that have borne the brunt of recent waves of revisionism. Hardly any female statues have been vandalised. The obvious reason for this is that there are far fewer statues of female leaders — because, again obviously, there has hardly been what anyone could call an abundance of women in charge of countries and armies.
But there’s a lot more to this than the obvious. South African sculptor Pitika Ntuli, whose current virtual multimedia exhibition Azibuyele Emasisweni (Return to the Source) features the voices of many women, says there are plenty of great women who deserve to be memorialised in stone.
Those he would like to see sculpted in SA include Miriam Makeba, Winnie MadikizelaMandela, Ruth First, Lillian Ngoyi, Frene Ginwala, Mkabayi (Shaka’s aunt), Modjadji (the Rain Queen), Norma Mabaso, Queen Nandi and Ingrid Jonker. And from other parts of Africa: Nzinga Ndongo of Angola; Yaa Asantewaa from Ghana; Makeda, Queen of Sheba; Amina, Queen of Zaria in Nigeria; Kandake, Empress of Ethiopia; and Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Muta Maathai.
“There is an absolute paucity of sculptures celebrating great women, and women at all for that matter,” says Ntuli. “It is an insidious effect of patriarchal, male-dominated societies, which do their very best to keep silence about women leaders. Those that they do admit to exist are not considered worthy of celebration and statuary.”
Some of the South African women he mentions have recently been cast in bronze. In 2016, then president Jacob Zuma unveiled the Women’s Living Heritage Monument at Lillian Ngoyi Square in Pretoria. The statues of the four women who led the 1956 antipass-law march — Ngoyi, Sophie de Bruyn, Helen Joseph and Rahima Moosa — have since joined a parade of bronze heroes frozen in mid-stride on a field in Century City near Cape Town. This is the Long March to Freedom project. A quarter of the 400 planned statues have been completed so far and roughly a third are women. Makeba is there, as are Olive Schreiner and British missionary Harriette Colenso.
This is a remarkable and commendable enterprise, but is it necessary to visit a field full of physical statues to learn about and appreciate the previously unsung heroes of our country?
In the case of “lesser” figures, statues can serve as a constant reminder of a person whose name might otherwise sink beneath the waves of history. Everyone in Kimberley knows who Frances Baard is because the trade unionist’s statue stands proudly outside a shopping centre.
It could be, however, that the residents of Kimberley walk past Frances every day on their way to buy bread and milk and no longer even notice her. The human attention span is finite, and mostly short.
Statues tend to lose their meaning and heft over time, or what they represent becomes diluted by new events and circumstances. Even the Statue of Liberty, who welcomes the world’s poor and homeless to the US from her pedestal on an island off Manhattan, now seems ironic at best, at worst a painful reminder of gentler times.
It is of course important to commemorate those who have done great and noble things. Some would say there can never be enough statues of Nelson Mandela and one hopes these will never be desecrated, although you never know which way the worm will turn.
The question is not which people should be immortalised in stone or whether they will one day cause offence and be torn down. It’s whether we need statues as historical records at all.
No-one is going to forget Mandela, or indeed Margaret Thatcher. Incidentally, a 3m-high likeness of “the Iron Lady” was recently completed. It cost the UK’s public memorials trust £300,000 (R6.6m) but instead of being raised on a plinth in Thatcher’s home town of Grantham as intended, the statue is being stored in a secret location for fear that anti-Thatcherites might smear nasty stuff on it in protest against some of her less noble deeds.
Defenders of the Thatcher statue say she will bring more tourists to the ailing provincial town, but do people really travel to see statues of those they admire or loathe? Maybe they do, but “statue” does not generally rate high on Tripadvisor’s lists of reasons to visit places. And why do we need physical reminders of towering historic figures when the ubiquitous internet serves as a repository of memory?
In 2004, in a thesis for the Curtin University of Technology, Online Memorialisation: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape for Remembering the Dead, Australian cyberspace scholar Kylie Veale examined the internet as a space for individual and collective memorialisation.
Veale wrote: “In the recent past, memorialisation is largely practised via granite, marble or bronze memorials in cemeteries, requiring physical visits that can be impeded by distance or physical ability. In a society that is increasingly fragmented … an alternate space to the physical needs to be provided. Several authors claim this alternate space is cyberspace.”
In what seems like a prophecy about the current wave of cultural iconoclasm, Veale points to the protected nature of cyberspace: “Timeliness, cost, accessibility and creativity are not the only advantages of online memorialisation. The web is also a favourable medium for preserving existing physical memorials from degradation and desecration.”
Since statues of women are only occasionally targets for desecration, this doesn’t seem to be a good reason to stop making them.
The question of whether we are doing women a service by casting them in bronze or stone is something else entirely.
In ancient times there were plenty of statues of women. The Greeks and Romans loved to leer at idealised female forms with their smooth marble curves. By contrast there are also millions of statues of Mary, mother of Jesus. The stereotyping of women into two categories, sex goddess or virgin, does not need spelling out — it’s up there on public plinths for all to see.
The world has moved beyond simplistic Madonnas and Aphrodites in statuary, but there are still questions about who is chosen to be memorialised. The statue Belle in Amsterdam’s red light district is supposed to be a tribute of dignity to sex workers, but she isn’t treated with respect by all who pose for pictures with her.
In recent instances, women picked to be memorialised represent weakness rather than strength. The gigantic statue of Marilyn Monroe in Palm Springs is a bone of contention among citizens of the state of California. Some find it tacky, others worship it. Similar sentiments have been expressed about the statues of Amy Winehouse in London and Brenda Fassie in Newtown, Johannesburg.
All three of these women were prodigiously talented and undoubtedly deserve to be memorialised, but when tragic figures who died young after being used and abused by fame are top of the list for such tributes, something seems a little off in the way the world views women.
In a 2010 article for the Critical Arts journal — “How to honour a woman: gendered memorialisation in postapartheid SA”, Sabine Marshall argues that the postapartheid government’s attempt to redress the gender imbalance in public monuments and memorials was not an unqualified success.
Citing the Gugu Dlamini memorial in Durban and seven memorials honouring women that were made possible by the Sunday Times Heritage Project, Marshall said that “artists involved in this task are faced with a unique conundrum. Some attempt to articulate genderspecific ‘difference’ and reject formulae associated with patriarchal commemorative practices (for example, bronze statue on pedestal), but they unintentionally tend to reinforce entrenched notions of traditional gender roles and contribute to the entrenchment of questionable ideas about what constitutes a fitting tribute to a woman. “Other artists pursue a ‘gender-blind’ approach, while still trying to break with the conventions of the monument genre, but as a result sometimes struggle to communicate notions of dignity and grandeur, which are often precisely contingent on such conventions.”
In plain speech, Marshall seems to be suggesting that the statue is a male concept. The mere fact that statues are “erected” gives weight to this theory. Statues, particularly those celebrating giants of history, tend to be heavy and portentous. They bear down on the public gaze like a knee upon a neck.
South African artist Paul Emmanuel’s Men and Monuments exhibition, which opens online on the Wits Art Museum website this week, is based on the idea that granite and other permanent materials reinforce stereotypes of masculinity in monuments. Instead he uses his body as an impermanent memorial, in one case imprinting the names of soldiers who died in World War 1 all over his flesh.
Whether the memories of figures great and small are remembered on the internet or stamped on someone’s torso, perhaps the monolithic historical statue is a fetish, a fleeting human folly, and perhaps its time is done. Or perhaps not.
When it comes to remarkable women and their legacies, a statue still seems like a good way to make visible that which has for too long been ignored and neglected.