Abstract
The times newspaper of 04 April 1960, wrote about a peaceful demonstration against
pass laws that was organised by the Pan African Congress (PAC), where the community
members of Sharpeville township went to the police station to lay their grievances.
South African Police (SAP) opened fire on the crowd. According to the times,
there were 249 victims in total, including 29 children, with 69 people killed and 180
injured.
In 2009, the Sharpeville Memorial precinct was officially opened to commemorate
this event and the signing of the constitution. According to Mr Nicho Ntema who was
the community representative for the memorial precinct development in 2009 , a full
and meaningful community participation from the design process was omitted. This
automatically omitted the cultural aspects of how Black South Africans mourn and
memorialise.
He continued to say that, “this has led to a discord around the development as the
community cannot relate to it.” The idea of the commemoration only taking place
once a year, in the form of “Human Rights Day”, previously known as the Sharpeville
massacre day raises questions; who was the memorial built for and what happens to
the community within the remaining 364 days of the year?
My MDP intend to tell the story of Sharpeville and the lack of honour and dignity in
how the massacre has been officially commemorated by the state for the past 12
years. To reveal what has been the status of the Sharpeville massacre’s memory both
in the shadows of the apartheid government and the new dispensation respectively.
To show how the omission of the community’s input in the establishment of what
is supposed to be their memorial precinct, became a continued act to further strip
them of their dignity, as it also led to the omission of their social values and norms
which are facilitated through rituals.
A bs t r a c t
Memorialisation practices involving public memory and history are usually located in
public spaces. According to Dawson 2019 such practices and their impact are therefore
tied up with key public space dynamics and tend, as a result, to respond to a wider variety
of imperatives than simply heritage preservation and representation. A crucial part of
this is how memorialisation practices presume things about the nature and trajectory of
publics being planned for.
Dawson further emphasises that the way public space shapes who counts as part of the
public acquires further salience in heritage discourses. Those who feel excluded from intendedly
publicly accessible heritage sites are thus excluded from spaces and discourses
of public memory, culture and identity, which is ‘an explicit form of denial and assertion
of power.
Such was my experience of the Sharpeville memorial precinct, I did not get a sense of
the massacre’s victims identity. There was a lack of spatial allocations and programs for
Black African traditional and cultural practices. A sad sight was the realization that the
community plays no part what so ever, mostly loitering outside the premises along the
high walls.
It was this experience that provoked an interest to look into the concept of Black African
ways of memorialising and commemoration, which would be informed by black cultures,
customs , heritage and everyday activities ( social values and norms).
My position stems with Galvin and Todres (2014) who suggest that dignity and honour in
an African context, has a bearing on identity. According to both, human beings appear
to carry a coherent and deep sense of their environments spatially, bodily, temporally
and in mood. How their environments provide for their needs, is core to their sense of
identity and has deep implications for their dignity.