Dead Memorial

Mid morning, on a sunny week day last month, Church square was surprisingly empty and quiet. The recently refurbished centre-city public space offered an eerie absence. Just a street away, the buzz of business was continuing as usual, but here the only people present comprised two tourists and a young family of four.

Church square is one our truly historical spaces, surrounded as it is with buildings drenched in the politics of the past. The upgrading over the past year or so had seen the car park removed and a paving project executed. Just a few weeks before that summery day, the mayor had unveiled the city’s official slave memorial on the corner of the square.

The concept of ‘giving the space back to the public’ seemed curiously at odds with the lack of passers-by on that bright morning. The tourists looked in their guide and took a half-hearted picture of the towering bronze statue of Hofmeyr, permanently fixed on facing the Groote Kerk’s back; the kids jumped up onto the stony boxes that form the new monument.

The boarded-up, grand-old National Mutual building (to become the Iziko Social history centre) with its medieval-prison style burglar bars had a dodo presence. An empty stage, as it were.

After giving a puzzled look at the new memorial (not in their guide book yet), the tourists moved on (towards admiring the beautiful frieze, half hidden on Parliament street-side of the Slave lodge). The boy, who jumped up on the bigger of the boxes quickly lost interest and moved on.

Some controversy (so what is new?) surrounded the selection of Wilma Cruise and Gavin Younge’s proposal for the Slave memorial, but here it is: different-sized polished granite ‘boxes’ engraved with phrases that relate to the Cape’s slave history.

With its reference to grave stones and heroic plinths, the new memorial, together with the unremitting dullness of the piazza, paved with those fake, cement cobblestones, seems to have turned the square into a funereal public space. The unfortunate banality of the grey electricity box on the corner seems to accentuate the unfortunate revamp.

South Africa’s slave history is one of sad, darkest horror. Unfortunately, and to our shame, it has been ignored for generations. Hundreds of Capetonians who merrily wandered up Parliament street to take their places in that institution, or, on Sundays, sat in the front benches of the Groote Kerk, didn’t know or care about the Slave tree (still barely visible as marker in the middle of Spin street).

At a symposium last month to mark the 200th anniversary of the Cape’s famous ‘Jij’ slave revolt, Iziko’s Jatti Bredenkamp rightly called the men under Louis, Abraham and Adonis the country’s first ‘freedom fighters’. Some were executed for the rebellion.

Yet only in recent times have South Africa’s bleak slave history seeped into general historical knowledge. Coming to terms with and memorialising it, is difficult - as the new memorial is proving. The ‘boxes’ are simply dead and dull - weighed down by an air of contrivance.

When that pretty old colonial baroque edifice nearby was renamed ‘Slave lodge’, the irony seemed uncomfortable and provocatively calculated. (Not that some fine exhibitions haven’t been offered there.) The new monument has a similar air of superficiality.

Slave memory deserves more subtle compassion, less gesture, denser consideration. It is proving to be difficult to grasp in (conventional) aesthetic terms.

The Cruise/Younge design understood that a minimalist approach is perhaps the only way in. Abstraction is preferable when one cannot claim to speak for those different and long gone. But ideas on paper don’t always work on the streets where we live and work.

Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial in the heart of Berlin (from which the present designers surely took a cue) also reference burial markings, but there the entire block had become an abstract cemetery, forcing the public to negotiate the spaces - and, by implication, to confront the horrors of history.

Cape Town’s effort to commemorate the tragedy of slavery was never going to be easy. Obviously the last thing to do would have been to utilise the means and manner of traditional colonial monuments (bronze, etc). But, for now, the solution hasn’t quite been found. Unless we want Church square to be permanently one large void.