Sites of Memory in Langa

Abstract

Using Pierre Nora’s conceptualization of “sites of memory,” this chapter illustrates ways of interweaving heritage conservation practices with people’s lives, stories, and knowledge about sites in their communities. In South Africa, a historical break occurred at the onset of democracy in 1994. During the recent period of democracy there have been various responses to the legacies of the preceding periods of Dutch and English colonialism, segregation, and apartheid. These include the democratic nation-state endeavors to overcome these legacies with processes such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), land restitution, and socioeconomic transformation programs. How do historians, heritage practitioners, and memory workers respond to the past in the present? In Chapter 9, I will argue that when breaks occur as forms of trauma and leave posttraumatic legacies in people’s memories, these cannot be closed off by redemptive reconstructions of history or cured by microhistories that promise healing through oral narration. These legacies are manifested as visual and emotional traces in memory. In the present chapter, drawing on oral histories, I explore how elder residents of Langa narrate the continuities and discontinuities of particular sites of memory.

Our interest in lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) where memory crystallizes and secretes itself has occurred at a particular moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with a sense that memory has been torn— but torn in a such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists.¹

—Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History, Les Lieux de Mémoire”