Commemorating and Forgetting employs a series of oppositions as a framework for understanding memorial practice in post-apartheid South Africa. Not only is there the dichotomy reflected in the title, but there are also memory/history, vernacular/authorized, and heritage/history. While there is some recognition that the divisions are much more fluid than the way than they have been presented, they are largely sustained as a narrative and analytical structure. Largely derived from and dependent upon the research of local authors that Martin then adapted to this framework, Commemorating and Forgetting in the end reinforces the narrative dichotomies it seeks to critique. Instead of opening up new vistas it closes down history and memory to alternative pasts.
Much like its genesis in visits undertaken first as a temporary lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand and then as part of organizing study groups for Colgate University, this book presents us with journeys to ‘sites of memory’ (p. 220) in post-apartheid South Africa. Most of the sites are physical structures in the form of museums and monuments, although there is an additional chapter on autobiographical texts as memorial markers. In all these encounters, the objective is to convey meanings and, by implication, memories inscribed through sometimes detailed descriptions of the representations of space and the built environment. The author sometimes alludes to the actual producers of these memorial sites and the responses of visitors, these are not his focus. Instead theoretical work in the international field of memory studies and a growing set of examples from South African scholarship are brought to bear upon the travel account. Using remembering and forgetting as two-sides of the same coin, Murray explains how certain dominant narratives are being inscribed in memory through commercial interests and the imperatives of the new state. In this process, Murray claims, certain histories are either sidelined or discarded from memory, as a commemorative pastiche primarily drawn from chronicles of liberation and struggle is inscribed upon the landscape of a South African past that ‘conceals’ and ‘evades responsibility’ (p. 217).
One of the major implications of Murray's approach is that the category of history appears to stand outside of history itself. ‘History’ is presented either as a reconstruction of events that happened (in contrast to the ways that they are represented) or as the practice of historians in the academy where the aim is the search for an objective truth (in contrast to heritage, for instance, which Murray, following David Lowenthal, maintains is always seeking alignments and relies upon distortion). The implication is that the content and methodology of the ‘history’ that Murray presents appear as a more appropriate methodology of commemoration, both more authentic and better aligned with democratic and communal aspirations. Why this should be the case is not apparent in Commemorating and Forgetting. What happens is that Murray sets up a hierarchy of knowledge production that reifies what he calls ‘history’ and fails to recognize its disciplinary formation and the ways its own practices are always partial and structured by narrative forms that set the limits on its ability to provide new and different sets of ‘truths’. The chapter on autobiographies provides a hint of different possibilities for history, but the judgments are about elisions, distortions, context, and purpose framed in the dichotomies he sets up.
Murray's book at times reads like an extended literature review. There is little evidence of new and sustained research and he draws heavily on previously published and unpublished material, such as Ciraj Rassool's work on the District Six Museum and Sabine Marschall's studies of memorial practices. The latter's accounts are used unquestioningly and extensively, reproducing some of its inaccuracies. For instance, following Marschall, he presents the practices surrounding the making and remaking of the Trojan Horse memorials in Athlone, Cape Town as one of vernacular versus state authority (p. 149). Yet, with the involvement of Human Rights Media Centre, it was the so-called ‘state’ project that appeared to involve a wider set of consultations and broader range of stakeholders and more closely approximated Murray's category of the ‘vernacular’. Such complexities are glossed over.
As with all journeys, the views are selective and we are offered glimpses into a much broader field than Murray presents here. Much more in-depth research is required in order to understand some of the fraught and entangled processes of memory formation in post-apartheid South Africa. It would be more fruitful for the reader to go directly to the work that Murray recapitulates.
