ABSTRACT
In July 1992 the South African History Workshop in Johannesburg hosted a conference, ‘Myths, Monuments, Museums’, for which the logo was the representation of a crowd fighting over one of the national monuments most closely identified with the apartheid regime – the Voortrekker Monument (Figure 8.1). The effectiveness of the logo derived partly from its ambiguity. From one perspective the crowd is shoring up the monument but from another it is clearly intent on pulling it down. The thorny question of the fate of monuments erected to commemorate regimes which have since been discredited and disgraced is not solely a South African dilemma of course. In the recent past the future of most of the public statuary in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the infamous ‘Wall’ in Berlin has been the subject of intense debate. It is not surprising that similar scrutiny has been levelled at much of the monumental public sculpture set up over the long apartheid years to commemorate key moments and figures in the Afrikaner nationalist canon.
