Memorialising our Liberation Struggle

Chris Chivers, former Canon Precentor of St George's Cathedral

Speaking at the recent Reparations and Memorialisation Conference in Athlone, poet and freelance journalist Sandile Dikeni made the simple yet telling point that South Africa most needs "human beings" who - by recovering and nurturing what it means fully to be human - are living memorials to the transcendence of apartheid’s dehumanising horrors.

For Dikeni what we most need to do "at a very basic level" is to proclaim our common humanity and to become rehumanised beings. But how are we actually to do so? Doubtless part of the answer to that question lies in the important mechanisms which have already been set in place towards the creation of a sustainable culture of human rights - the context, for instance, which the Truth and Reconcilation Commission provided for a communal discourse of memory to be heard, confronted, shared, acknowledged and valued. But as the words of the TRC report embed themselves in the social fabric of our history - as a source of memory and inspiration - we need now, as the report itself suggested, to develop other, non-verbal ways of carrying the twin discourses of memory and human rights forward - ways which will challenge and motivate us to recover further our common humanity.

I once heard the late rabbi and Shoah survivor Hugo Gryn questioned during a lecture on why he remained a Jew given all that he and his family had suffered as Jews. In reply he took from his briefcase a beautiful menorah. "This," he said, pointing to the seven-armed candlestick, "is why I remain a Jew. This is my context. It’s in fact the only thing I possess which connects me to the family whom the Nazis took from me. And it’s this beautiful thing which most inspires me to try and rediscover my humanity as a faithful Jew."

At the time two things struck me about what he had said. The first was the way in which, as he held his family menorah, he clearly located himself within an age-old tradition of worship and storytellin- a story of slavery transcended - which, Gryn believed, could continue to give contemporary hope and meaning. The second was the simple fact that he drew inspiration from an object of immense beauty

In our own context the TRC process has made the ongoing importance of storytelling as a means of discerning truth, recording and interpreting suffering and of giving hope very clear to us. The pressing need to create beautiful, non-verbal means of encapsulating our stories remains however more elusive.

Chinua Achebe once said that suffering could give rise to something beautiful. Yet, as Ciraj Rassool has recently pointed out, there is really nothing very beautiful - in fact quite a lot that is rather functional and shoddy - about some of the initial attempts to memorialise our past - the recently erected Trojan Horse and Gugulethu Seven memorials among them. Added to which these two memorials were erected without consultation with those who are the chief custodians of the painful memories they seek to memorialise. This is why, as we make the connection between memories of suffering and their possible transcendence, we do need to focus on questions of consultation and beauty.

The German composer Paul Hindemith once said that all art had to be useful. In response to this, his fellow composer, the Russian, Igor Stravinsky, remarked that the only useful art is that which is beautiful. At the recent Athlone conference Justice Richard Goldstone added that our memorials must be multi-faceted - they must embrace the whole history of South African society - if they are to be relevant and to contribute meaningfully to the recovery of a common humanity.

Memorials must then be useful, beautiful and multi-faceted, they must result from processes of consultation with the custodians of the memories themselves and point to an over-arching context of reference and meaning – to those archetypal stories of transcended suffering within which most people locate meaning and identity.

It would be a brave person indeed who would advance a scheme for a memorial claiming to balance all these elements. Yet this week, as St George’s Cathedral launches a fund-raising campaign to complete its Great West Window - as a memorial to our common transcendence of apartheid and colonialism - we dare to risk making that claim and to lay our scheme open for further public scrutiny and critique in the hope that we may make a contribution to the debate around the issue of memorialisation.

Those who know the cathedral well will recall that one panel of the Great West Window already exists. This was installed in 1983 as a memorial to Earl Mountbatten of Burma, murdered by the IRA in 1979. On the face of it such a "colonial" association is not perhaps a promising place from which to begin to fashion the new "liberation" windows. But the subject of the existing panel is the triumph of good over evil. And it was installed at a time when the apartheid state had assumed its most repressive guise. So the "Mountbatten" panel was in fact a subtle - yet powerfully prophetic - prefiguring of the ultimate conquering of apartheid evil

Deliberately embracing the ambiguity of this part-colonial, part-prophetic panel - as a means of holding in tension past and present experience - the new panels have been designed to elucidate further the central theme of liberation. In this the aim has been to point up the specifics of our context.

One panel will thus depict St George - the cathedral’s patron - slaying the dragon. But this is clearly the dragon of apartheid – a resonance that is made more explicit by the presence of "oppressive" barbed wire and rows of crosses - as a remembrance of all those whose sacrifices made our freedom possible. An accompanying representation of the People’s Cathedral pays direct tribute to Dean Ted King whose ministry enabled St George’s to be such a place of open protest and sanctuary.

The other panel will depict St Michael slaying a beast with seven heads - representing the seven deadly sins and a clear allusion to the process by which the evil dragons within every human being need to be slain. Also included is a depiction of Gandhi - not only for his association with Mountbatten but also for his efforts to combat racism in South Africa and globally to advance non-violent means of conquering evil - means which inspired Albert Luthuli and Desmond Tutu among others.

In choosing these symbols - after consulting widely among those with long associations with the cathedral - it has been felt that they have the ability to resonate not only within our South African context and the cathedral’s specifically Christian tradition but also within the context of other religious and archetypal frameworks.

Designed by internationally renowned glaziers Gabriel and Jacques Loire, the new panels will be a stunning, visual encapsulation of the totality of our histories. They will be a powerful symbol of the fact that while we cannot - in Mamphela Ramphele’s words - undo the past, we must all transcend it. At the cathedral we nevertheless realise that this memorial represents simply one stage in a process that will have to see us create other "spaces" within which people may begin to grapple with questions of history, identity and humanity. We also recognise that the presence of a completed Great West Window must serve as an inspiration for us to continue - in very practical ways - to liberate the marginalised in our community.

But we hope nonetheless that in offering the Great West Window to the people of Cape Town - in the Cathedral’s centenary year - we can give some impetus to a debate and discourse of defining importance for our society.

From the Cape Times, Tuesday 7 November 2000

Back to Features page

Mission and Vision | Services | Music | Ministries | History | Glass | Tour | Bells | Labyrinth | Shop
Staff & Contacts | Cathedral Friends | Publications | Features | Sermons | Links | Site Map | Home