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This paper uses actor-network theory (ANT) to study a grassroots' ecological rehabilitation project in a marginalized area of Cape Town. By tracing the stabilization of relations between residents, authorities, plants and green areas, the paper demonstrates how ANT can be enfolded into the study of African cities as an attentive way to rethink agency, empowerment and collective action. It also shows how ANT allows for the study of epistemological and ontological politics inherent to all collective action-here demonstrating how plants participated in giving voice to memories of oppression while undermining expert-based practices that separate Nature and Culture.
Housing Cape Town’s Forgotten Dead: Conflict in the Post-apartheid Public Sphere1
2016
On 28 May 2008, the Cape Town Partnership Company Executive Officers's newsletter reported on an 'Interfaith ceremony at Prestwich Place [sic]' to 'consecrate' a new ossuary building recently completed in Cape Town's central business district. The announcement placed the Ossuary alongside other Partnership initiates and events such as the Harvest Festival, the Creative Cape Town initiative, and the upgrading of the Cape Town Station and the Grand Parade managed through the Partnership and the City Improvement District. The building of the Ossuary is intended to memorialise and bring closure to the contestations over the re-emergence of burial spaces in the city that have taken place in Cape Town since 2004. Presented as a successful 'partnership' between the Prestwich Place Project Committee, the City of Cape Town, the South African Heritage Resources Agency, the District Six Museum and Heritage Western Cape, this symbolic act of closure has been hailed a breakthrough in terms of heritage practice by practitioners and city officials alike. In this paper we visit the space of the Ossuary and its associated exhibition in the city, and reflect on the relationship between life space and burial space in Cape Town. Following the official path of the exhibition we pause to attach our own notes-a series of fragmentary interventions which trouble the smooth surface of containment. We use the experience of walking to reflect on the architecture of closure.
Archaeology dreaming: post-apartheid urban imaginaries and the bones
This article is concerned with the materiality of memory and identity in the post-colony, as mediated by the corporeal remains of the colonial underclasses themselves. Prestwich Street is in a rapidly gentrifying part of Cape Town, close to the Waterfront, the city's glitzy international zone. The accidental discovery of an early colonial burial site in Prestwich Street in the course of construction activities in May 2003, and its subsequent exhumation, became the occasion of a fiercely contested public campaign. This pitted pro-exhumation heritage managers, archaeologists and property developers against an alliance of community activists, spiritual leaders and First Nations representatives. The materiality of the site and its remains became a key point of focus for the working out of a range of forces and interests in post-apartheid society, including the buried legacies of slavery and colonialism in the city, the memory of apartheid forced removals, and post-apartheid struggles over restitution and representation. I argue that, even as the heightened political contexts of the events around Prestwich Street significantly determine the shape and nature of an emergent post-apartheid public sphere (on the one
Mapping and excavating spectral traces in post-apartheid Cape Town
Memory Studies, 2009
This article explores how spectral traces at places marked by acts of violence and injustice allow residents to come into contact with past and future inhabitants of the postcolonial city. We examine controversies surrounding Prestwich Place, Cape Town, an informal burial ground for colonial underclasses that was unearthed when construction began for an upscale ‘New York-style’ apartment and office complex. The human remains that emerged embodied a past that exceeded national narrations of public memory and presented this past as an object of concern for private capital and activists. Rather than offer a biography of the site, we develop two concepts, memorial cartographies and haunted archaeologies, that represent terrains not visible on Cartesian mappings. We understand these narrative strategies as creative acts that honour those who have gone before; both practices encourage us to listen as witnesses to geographies of loss that continue to structure contemporary urbanisms.
Bury the Cemetery? Exploring the future of urban burial sites as part of the South African landscape
Proceedings of the 51st International Federation of Landscape Architecture World Congress on Thought and Action, 2014
Burial sites are a reflection of a culture and the evolution of a society over time. It contains a record of tangible and intangible cultural expressions in the landscape and reflects the city layout and society's values and economic disposition. Rapid population growth, urbanization challenges the and resultant pressures on land caused space efficiency and the economic value of land to become primary determinants of the nature and location of new burial sites as well as the fate of burial sites reaching capacity. The result is monotonous burial sites expelled to cheap land on the outskirts of the city where the dead is left to decay in sterilized solitude amidst industry and landfill site. Ritual and visitor experience no longer shapes the landscape, but is accommodated if space and budget allows. On the other hand centrally located burial sites that reached capacity fall prey to commercial and other developments. Although burial sites are protected by heritage legislation in South Africa, it is often required that only a representative sample of the grave markers be fenced fenced off where it will be conserved out of context in its uncomfortable relationship with the new development. It is only when a burial site becomes an integral part of community life and their immediate environment that people will content for the protection of it. This paper argues that the future inclusion of burial sites as part of the heritage landscape is at the mercy of a modern multicultural society's disposition toward death and the ability of built environment professionals to influence this disposition. It also critically consider the value of partial preservation of burial sites where partial preservation divorces architectural elements from spatial layout, ritual and contextual influences. The obvious and tangible symbolic elements are typically protected while meaning and identity is lost.
This Land South Africa": rewriting time and space in postapartheid poetry and property
Environment and Planning A, 2001
The widespread concern in recent South African poetry with landscape and the question of what place the poet occupies in that landscape arises less as a response to the turn of the millennium than to the historical end of formal apartheid, but nonetheless marks an epochal shift in sensibility. Whereas much poetry of the 1980s evoked a sense of extreme dislocation in recent time and local space (marked by references to a precarious present of forced removal and migrancy, and unspecified, unsettled futures), some significant recent work has been marked by a desire to relocate the human presence in South Africa in terms of geological time and continental space. This generalization needs to be qualified by reference to racial and political positioning within South Africa, and in this paper I distinguish between the work of committed white writers such as ex-political-prisoner Jeremy Cronin (now Secretary of the South African Communist Party) and Barry Feinberg (now curator of the Mayibu...
Ruin Memory: a hauntology of Cape Town
Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the tropes of modernity. A. Gonzalez-Ruibal., 2013
My themes in this chapter are the quintessentially archaeological ones of time and the materiality of the past in the present. But rather than a notion of modern time -linear time, in which the past is divided from the present, and the present from the future -I want to think about a more complicated relationship between present lives, past events and future possibilities. In particular, I want to think about what Anthony Bogues has called 'historical catastrophe', the idea of an atrocious set of events set in the past, and the ways in which these events are reproduced and recapitulated in new forms and contemporary disguises (Bogues 2010). As a set of points of departure, I want to think about the way in which history, especially history as catastrophe, is inscribed onto the bodies of its subjects, as well as onto familiar landscapes and cityscapes. I want to think about the performativity of history, and the ways in which we negotiate the material landscapes of the past/present through a set of embodied responses, so that the past is not abstract historical narrative, but is daily recapitulated and performed as a set of routes, intersubjective relations, and moments of rest and unrest. I want to think about a more complex thematics of time, in terms of notions of simultaneity, repetition, co-presence, and moments of rupture and return. I want to think about memory not as a voluntaristic act of recall of the past, but as a constitutive act directed at the present and the future. I also want to think about forgetting not just as a failure of memory, but as a conscious act of dis-remembering which allows historical injustice to be recapitulated in forms of contemporary social injustice (so that forgetting becomes its own kind of constitutive act).
Reflecting on a body of family photographs from forcibly removed ex-residents of Roger Street, District Six, Cape Town, I shift frames, from aesthetics to restorative justice, to open a set of questions around trauma, memory and freedom in the aftermath of oppression. Intimate documents of family life, the photographs speak of the destruction of community and of the multiple valencies of place and home. They also speak of historical catastrophe and of the unfinished business of apartheid. Approaching the notion of archive as being open-ended, and not bound in time and space, I suggest a principled and forceful space for engaging a set of debates that lie at the centre of post-apartheid society, even as they are generally disavowed.