Content uploaded by Mathias Alubafi Fubah
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Mathias Alubafi Fubah on Mar 28, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
This book comprises eight essays that consider the politics and polemics of monuments in
Africa in the wake of the #RhodesMustFall movement in 2015. The removal of the Rhodes
statue from UCT main campus is the pivot on which the discussion of monuments as
heritage in South Africa turns. It raised a number of questions about the implementation of
heritage policy and the unequal deployment of memorials in the South African and other
postcolonial landscapes. The essays in this volume are written by authors coming from different
backgrounds and different disciplines. They address different aspects of this event and its
aftermath, offering some intensive critique of existing monuments, analysing the successes of new
initiatives, meditating on the visual resonances of all monuments and attempting to map ways of
moving forward.
In the essays in this book the authors tackle policy questions, aspects of history and some of
the new monuments aimed at redress in the present South African climate. It is to be hoped
that a reading of this book will inform the decisions made by politicians and culture brokers
when they spend taxpayers’ money on the erection of monuments. It would be refreshing if the
artists commissioned to make such monuments could look at African traditions of figuration and
commemoration which fall outside the monumental, and if the artists could be professional and
theoretically informed of the ways in which monuments are commissioned, planned andaccessed.
www.africansunmedia.co.za | orders@africansunmedia.co.za
978-1-928480-58-7
R300 PRINT
978-1-928480-59-4
R240 E-BOOK
Exchanging Symbols
Monuments and memorials in post-apartheid South Africa
