History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa

by Annie E. Coombes
Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2003
384 pp., illus. 117 b/w, 11 col. Trade, $99.95; Paper, $27.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3060-1; ISBN: 0-8223-3072-5.

Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg

andrea.dahlberg@bakernet.com

The central theme of Annie E Coombes’ book, History After Apartheid, is the role of material culture in creating, challenging, and transforming collective identities. In a series of case studies about national monuments, museums, ethnographic displays, works of art, and buildings, she demonstrates how debates about identity and the past are embodied in visual and spacial representations in public spaces.

These debates have become especially intense and complex in South Africa in the post-apartheid era. The Voortrekker Monument, an icon intended to legitimise the apartheid state, became a symbolically charged site for groups wanting to create another version of the past. Robben Island became the locus of a number of debates about its future role: Should it be preserved as a public memorial or transformed into something else entirely to indicate the liberation and new future of the country?

One of the most interesting case studies concerns attempts to transform representations of South African history and culture in South Africa House in Trafalgar Square, London. South Africa House was the scene of one of the most enduring political protests ever, hence the desire in the post-apartheid era to transform its outdated and sometimes offensive representations of race and culture as a sign of the new order then being created. However, English Heritage, a UK conservation organisation, would not allow the offending images to be removed on the ground that they were part of the heritage of England. Artists were then commissioned to make alterations to the images to change their meaning while, at the same time, preserving them. They employed various strategies to objectify the pictures and to make the viewer aware that they were products of a particular time and group.

Although many of the case studies concern art and public monuments, Coombes does not study them as part of an art historical process. Instead of focusing on their appearance, styles, and relationship to earlier art works, she reveals their contemporary social and political contexts and the different understandings of them held by different groups. The result is a series of case studies that reveal how the past can be transformed and contemporary meanings are created and contested.

Questions about how identity is constructed, linked to particular places, and related to power are especially relevant in the post-cold war era. The issues Coombes examines in this book have been played out in different ways across the former Soviet Union as statues have been dismantled and destroyed and names of cities and streets changed. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall and, more recently, the destruction of the statues of Saddam Hussein in Iraq demonstrate how destroying public monuments is a powerful symbolic act that plays an important role in destroying one regime and seeking to create an alternate power structure. Coombes points out that in the South African case studies these questions are also bound up with issues of settler colonialism that are the focus of important questions of power and identity in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US.

This book will be of interest to many students of anthropology, sociology, art history, geography, museum studies, and urban studies.