Adonis Diaries

Jeffrey Brown:

High above Cape Town at the Southern Tip of Africa, a stately memorial to Cecil John Rhodes, the British-born 19th century diamond magnate and colonial conqueror.

But notice the bust of Rhodes. His nose has been hacked off.

It was on the nearby campus of the prestigious University of Cape Town, with a historically white majority student body, that protests over another prominent statue of Rhodes set off a national debate in South Africa two years ago, when student activists started what became known as the Rhodes Must Fall movement.

Jeffrey Brown:

Chumani Maxwele, one of the protest leaders, recently accompanied us to an informal settlement in the Cape Town township of Khayelitsha, just a short drive from campus.

He pointed to the disparities that make South Africa one of the world’s most unequal societies.

Jeffrey Brown:

The Rhodes statue on campus was eventually removed by the university, but students continue to press on issues of school’s costs and curriculum.

Alex Gotz was one of 12 students punished by the administration as the protests expanded.

Jeffrey Brown:

The head of the university, Max Price, acknowledges more needs to be done to address the remnants of apartheid.

Jeffrey Brown:

In South Africa today, visual imagery teaches, as at the entrance to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, where visitors are confronted with the history of racial divisions.

It honors, as in a memorial in Soweto, to Hector Pieterson, a 13-year-old killed by police in the 1976 uprising against apartheid. And it’s also contentious.

Jeffrey Brown:

Alana Bailey manages heritage issues at AfriForum, a civil rights group working on behalf of Afrikaners, the white descendants of predominantly Dutch settlers who arrived here in the 17th century, and who in the 20th century established the apartheid regime that only ended in 1994.

Bailey now works to protect monuments.

Jeffrey Brown:

In the capital, still widely known as Pretoria, many street names have been changed from the white colonial and apartheid era figures to liberation struggle leaders, mostly black.

The larger municipality itself is now officially called Tshwane, after an 18th century indigenous chief. And still the most prominent face of the new South Africa, a huge statue of Nelson Mandela stands in front of the official seat of the national government. The statue that previously stood here, of an Afrikaner nationalist leader, was moved to a far corner of the gardens.

In Church Square in the center of the city, another contentious site is getting a makeover — the monument to 19th century Afrikaner leader Paul Kruger is now surrounded by fencing after being vandalized several times.

Mayor Solly Msimanga plans to keep the statue, but transform the whole square into a new kind of monument that’s dedicated to free speech.

Jeffrey Brown:

So you are against taking down the old statues?

Jeffrey Brown:

Outside the city, a different kind of accommodation of histories. The huge Voortrekker Monument is dedicated to Afrikaner pioneers who migrated inland in the 19th century, chafing at then-British colonial rule.

It opened in 1949, just a year after the official onset of apartheid.

Nearby stands the much newer Freedom Park, a monument erected in the democratic era and dedicated to South Africans of all backgrounds killed in wars, as well as in the liberation struggle against apartheid.

Last year, directors Cecilia Kruger and Jane Mufamadi strengthened ties between their two adjacent monuments.

Jeffrey Brown:

A lot of people just wonder what a monument is, right, and what’s it for.

Cecilia Kruger:

All heritage is part of somebody’s identity, somewhere. The minute you understand the monuments and what it symbolizes, you begin to understand each other’s identity.

Mpho Matsipa:

Reconciliation without justice can only get you so far, and by that, at a very simple level, economic justice or spatial justice.

Mpho Matsipa:

The landscape. The landscape of a city like Johannesburg remains, in my mind, a monument to apartheid spatial planning and apartheid spatial thinking.

Mpho Matsipa:

The way it’s laid out, the way people live, the way that inequality is spatialized and continues to be spatialized in the city serves as a monument to that history.

Chumani Maxwele:

If you are giving us free education, we will be able to have cousins, sisters, brothers across and be able to work together because we have got skill. You are educated. You can be employed. That’s the whole essence of the fight.