Remembering the decolonial nation: the M.T. Steyn statue as a site of struggle.
Loading...
Date
2021
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
The study tracks the meaning/s of the M.T. Steyn statue, that stood on the grounds
of the University of the Free State main campus, through two contextual periods:
against a fledgling Afrikaner nationalism at the time of the statue’s unveiling in
1929, and against the cries for transformation and decolonisation associated with
the #RhodesMustFall movement that swept through South African campuses in
2015 and which eventually led to the relocation of the statue. This is done to
understand how a cultural artefact embodies different meanings over a range of
social and historical contexts, which, when read against these contexts can
express and illuminate them in new and insightful ways. In this way the
meaning/s of the statue is explored as a key in developing an understanding of
how ‘heritage’ was and is constructed in the different periods in question. The
research utilised theories of representation (Hall, 1997) combined with the notion
of articulation, as used by Stuart Hall (1996), that imagines discourse as made up
of unities consisting of ‘articulated’ elements that are both ‘structured’ and
spoken’ at the same time. This is used to describe ‘heritage’ as consisting of
articulated notions of culture, identity and the past that transform over time and
which, at different times, present different conceptualisation of the nation, who
belongs, what culture is worth preserving, and what past constitute the past of the
‘nation’ i.e. that constitute the mirror in which a nation or a group can recognise
itself. The study found that the statue of M.T. Steyn articulated an Afrikaner
nationalist discourse, culturally expressed as a drive towards endogeneity and
‘ownness’, at the time of its unveiling in 1929, and the antithesis of what the
#RhodesMustFall movement articulated as its own modus operandi in 2015,
namely decoloniality. Furthermore, a relationship between what both these drives
for cultural transformation embodied became evident when ‘reading’ the two
periods together in an attempt to gain insight into a pre-dominant construction of
heritage in contemporary South Africa. This ‘reading’ suggested that an
opportunity to re-articulate the statue in a productive and affirmative way, that
could resonate with a broader, outward looking, decolonial struggle many could
identify with, got lost with its relocation. The contribution of the research to the
study of ‘heritage’ in South Africa was using the theory of articulation to
understand the landscape ‘holistically’, i.e., that included both a discursive and
semiotic approach. Furthermore, by exploring the ‘meaning’ of a particular statue
that had not been extensively researched in any academic text, hopefully provided
new insight into the contemporary heritage landscape, embodied in a particular
cultural artefact.
Description
Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.