/ 27 September 2001

Clashing symbols

This year’s Heritage Day, which falls on September 24, has as its theme “Celebrating our National Symbols”. The Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, responsible for the official approach, betrays a hint of anxiety around heritage issues on this significant day. Its press release reads: “Our national symbols deserve the dignity and respect of all of our people because they were decided upon in a consultative, inclusive and transparent way.”

Could it be, as official sentiment would have it, that South Africans aren’t showing the appropriate respect for the national anthem, the flag and the coat of arms?

The trouble with reserving a moment in which a nation reflects on its heritage is that to every group, and almost every person, heritage means something different.

Nowhere is this more evident than in book publishing about heritage issues. Take, for example, Luli Callinicos’s The World That Made Mandela: A Heritage Trail (STE Publishers). In the foreword, Walter Sisulu sums up the contradiction inherent in heritage publishing when he quotes a speech made by African National Congress treasurer SM Molema in 1952: “All the monuments, all the celebrations and all the feasts of the white man have a diametrically opposite meaning for the black man.”

By the same token, though we may not like to admit it, somewhere someone is grumbling about the national symbols being celebrated on Heritage Day this year.

Yet Nelson Mandela is universally regarded as symbolic of South Africa’s road to democracy. It’s not surprising, then, that in his life story a number of aspects, geographical and historical, combine to make a picture book full of unexpected twists and locations, hardly characteristic of stock tourist fare.

The advantage of Mandela as an international tourist attraction is that his story spans the length and breadth of the country, highlighting some of the strange juxtapositions that have cropped up with the passing of time. Callinicos’s “Site 63” is the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park, the location of what she calls the “negotiated revolution”. These days the World Trade Centre is more recognisable as the casino called Caesar’s of Gauteng. Likewise, Red Square, a meeting place in Fordsburg once popular with the Communist Party is now the back parking lot of the Oriental Plaza shopping mall.

What Callinicos’s work shows us, time and again, is that historical significance doesn’t necessarily have to combine with geographical beauty to be attractive to travellers. Mere symbolism will suffice.

This is the basis upon which contemporary heritage tourism is built. At the same time, her demonstrates that the inhabitants of Africa don’t have to be viewed as part of the continent’s natural history (like its wildlife) to be interesting as tourist attractions.

The same cannot be said of the work of the late TV Bulpin, however authoritative it may have proven itself over preceding decades. First published in 1970, and running to six editions, his mammoth work Discovering Southern Africa (Discovering SA Productions) was reissued this year. Here one finds the quaint language of colonial tourism from Africa’s past: “In [South Africa] you can step back for a while from the plastic age to the stone age, meet on a friendly basis with people from the most distant past and find their cultures worthwhile to treasure, their life-style with nature a lesson in harmony.”

Where Callinicos’s work dwells on struggle and strife, Bulpin’s concentrates, with near reverence, on developments the country made after the arrival of Europeans. Unsurprisingly, the book contains not one reference to Mandela or the ANC.

But this is not to say that Discovering Southern Africa has no merit at all. On the contrary, if a serious traveller wanted a broad picture of the country, with practical information about our roads and towns, Bulpin’s book would be a better buy than Callinicos’s – hers has a more narrow niche.

Generally there is a lack of resource information for sightseers in South Africa. But every now and then an authoritative guide will arrive, and it’s good to catch these when they do. Art Routes: A Guide to South African Art Collections (Witwatersrand University Press) is edited by Rayda Becker and Rochelle Keene. In their introduction to this essential work the editors draw attention to the complex relationship between gallery art and “heritage items” (a kosher new way of saying “craft”). They have decided to include in their guide the kind of artefacts normally housed in ethnological museums in an attempt to expand the “conventional definition of art” – namely, “beadwork, pots and staffs”.

Becker and Keene, in other words, are ironing out destructive differences. Collecting practices, they claim, are changing, and we now see that “old classification systems are breaking down”. Surely this is the point: where once we regarded the terrain as categorically simple, the local tourist industry now has to reflect, and explain, the realities of the African street.

How these publications deal with the contradictions in the society is a measure of their worth. Far from “sorting out” the grey areas, in an attempt to classify aspects of historical experience, they tend to remind us that the patterns displayed by history – and the resonances of its symbols – are those we give to it.