ABSTRACT
Focusing on the construction of the “White” Delville Wood memorial space in France and South Africa, this chapter looks at the way in which the Black multicultural post-Apartheid South African government has worked to reshape South African identity at Delville Wood. In particular, it examines how a Black soldier was reburied inside the site’s Afrikaner stronghold and how the story of the sinking of the SS Mendi, long forgotten by the South African authorities, resurfaced. This South African troopship sank in 1917 on its way from Plymouth to Le Havre with the loss of some 600 Black soldiers from the South African Native Labour Corps. This chapter suggests that the opening in 2017 of a room inside the Delville Wood Museum, dedicated to the SS Mendi and the Black soldiers, was a way to symbolically enable the ghost of the SS Mendi to reach port, not Le Havre, its original geographical destination, but a lieu de mémoire that is close to the heart of every South African. One hundred years after the event, these ghosts have come to play a central role in the construction of a new South African identity.
