Award winning Red Location Museum

Jeanne Wright

Port Elizabeth’s award winning Red Location Museum of the People’s Struggle has opened its doors for business. The museum emerged from a national competition held in 1998 for the design of a civic precinct in the depressed and poverty stricken, but historically significant, Red Location area of New Brighton. It is the first building from the master plan to be completed. Still to be implemented is an outdoor amphitheatre and new housing. The project is designed to revitalise and transform the centre of the100year old township. Situated in the oldest urban squatter settlement on the fringes of Port Elizabeth’s industrial areas, the museum is situated in the midst of the densely packed shack city surrounding it. Known locally as ‘Elalini Ebomvu’, the museum was designed to preserve, commemorate and document the history of the black residents’ struggle for freedom against Apartheid.
Architect Jo Noero’s design chosen from an initial submission of 151 entries, re-invents the notion of a cultural space in that the internal spaces are intimidating, austere and deliberately unglamorous. South African born Noero makes the point that the awarding of the prestigious and fiercely competed for Royal Institute of British Architects’ Lubetkin Prize opens a window onto specifically South African architecture. One of the salient features of the brief was the invention of a different type of architecture which would be approachable and which would resonate with the people of New Brighton who have had no direct experience of museums. Under Apartheid, black and coloured people were forbidden to visit museums, libraries and other cultural buildings except as employees and then through the back door.
Under the canopy of the industrially structured roof, twelve 6 x 6 metre steel clad ‘memory boxes’ are arranged in configuration. There is no set route to follow and the contents of each box are only revealed when the space is entered. The external cladding of these boxes is rusted corrugated iron 12 metres high and the visual impact is overwhelmingly claustrophobic and anti-sensory. Gloomy and even cathedral like, one experiences a strange compulsion to lower one’s voice and to explore with circumspection the single opening to each. Interstitial spaces in the alleyways between the boxes are dominated by the towering red, rusted corrugated iron walls. Because the space is confined, one is constantly reminded and confronted by the genesis and historical import of the material. Originally the iron was used for barracks in a Boer War concentration camp near Uitenhage. The sheds were later moved to Red Location in 1902 where they housed a battalion of British soldiers before they were adapted by shack dwellers to form the existing slum community outside the museum. The material thus works both as a carrier of meaning as well as a structural entity.
As yet, only a few of the boxes have material displayed within. The intention is to house memorabilia and documentation of the consequences of institutionalised Apartheid and to record the history of the local Red Location citizens including prominent leaders like Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, John Kani and George Pemba.
Noero comments “One of the horrors of Apartheid was the sense of normalcy…. the ability of its perpetrators to shut out from memory the ghastly consequences of institutionalised racism”. Many Red Location citizens were dedicated participants in the civil disobedience, boycotts and even violence of the anti-Apartheid years and it was here that the first passive resistance against the pass laws took place. From 1950, the township was the focus of significant political mobilisation and activity and it was here that the first underground cell of UmKhonto we Siswe (MK) was established.
Noero comments that “we wanted to make this a place of disquiet and reflection……. to construct a museum which deals with memories from the past in a way which will recall not only particular histories but also will also be understandable to people in contemporary South Africa…… to allow as many voices as possible to be heard and in a way which requires visitors to construct their own story and their own interpretation.”
One is also able to visit the hermetically sealed mausoleum space which currently houses one imposing (and empty) green stone sarcophagus destined for the remains of Apartheid activist and national figure Govan Mbeki. The room also contains another glass enclosed space which was destined to house the remains of Raymond Mhlaba. The project has been mired in controversy from its inception, the re-interment of Mbeki who is buried in Zwide( another Port Elizabeth township) subsequently being vetoed by the Mbeki family. There is also an adjacent auditorium/theatre space which has two sets of raked seating facing one another suggesting possibilities for an Imbizo type gathering.
Because local culture was suppressed for so long, the opening of this centre is a step toward redressing imbalances of race, class and equality. The centre will eventually include studios and shops specialising in indigenous art of all sorts together with spaces for jazz and marimba bands, an art gallery, library, adult literacy and conference facilities.
Comparisons have inevitably been drawn between this building and other museums dealing with social trauma like the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Israel and the Auschwitz museum near Oswiecim in Poland. Noero sees “…our little tsotsi of a building”as an extraordinary because it is in the middle of a shack settlement and it explores things which are all within the lived memory of some of the current shack dwellers. Some of them are in the old ‘80’s photographs which are displayed in enlarged panels on the outside walls. For outsiders, the essential difference is that access to this museum still goes through the extant township that was the crucible for the Struggle and that the history which is reflected in the material inside the museum endorses the experience.
The museum has also been awarded the Delado Minosse 2005/2006 International Prize for Commissioning a Building and the 2005 World Leadership award for an architecture and civil engineering project.