John Matshikiza “It’s quite weird,” said the public relations lady from Caesars gambling and entertainment complex, “that it is now casinos that are keeping South African history alive.” Weird, but, supposedly, in her opinion, wonderful. There are, indeed, few signs of memorials or heritage sites being created by the government or industry. But at Caesars, on the Kempton Park site of the conference centre where South Africa’s new dispensation was hammered out at the Conference for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa), and at Gold Reef City, on the site of a gold mine long past its useful working life, museums (of a sort) are sprouting up to give us some perspective on our recent history. To be honest, the Krok Brothers’ Apartheid Museum, adjacent to Gold Reef City, is making a little more effort. They spent several million rand erecting an imposing building and landscaping the blasted heath around it so that it resembles once more the natural environment as it was before the gold diggers came along and turned the soil into an acid-burned wasteland. The content of the museum itself still leaves much to be desired. The grim, numbing, cumulative effect of apartheid’s myriad rules and regulations almost defies containment within these grandly imposing walls. The sounds and smells of apartheid’s humiliation almost demand a site as varied and complex as a Disneyland or a Gold Reef City, for that matter. The facts, figures and photographs assembled here are just the beginning of the journey. Truly reliving even some aspects of the apartheid experience would be far more instructive to future generations of all races. At least the Gold Reef Apartheid Museum stands alone. People can come there, be piously regretful for a few minutes, and then jump back into their tourist coaches to sample the slot machines of the casino on the adjacent lot.
Caesars’s contribution to the history of the struggle is strictly in-house, tacked on at the far end of its long parade of gaming rooms, restaurants, cocktail bars and cabaret corners, plus a five-star hotel or two. Seemingly remembering at the last minute its obligation to the Gaming Board to at least show some signs of social conscience, the management of this Las Vegas-sponsored extravaganza dug up some unused space between a gift shop and a Chinese restaurant, where they proudly set up the Ubunye Exhibition. The Ubunye (“Unity”) Exhibition boasts panels of information about the Codesa process and the history of the African National Congress, and is crowned by a series of displays of what its PR package calls “amazingly lifelike waxwork figures of key personalities who shaped the democratisation of South Africa”. If they were truly intended to be amazingly lifelike, something must have gone desperately wrong in the moulding process. Here we have a lean and hungry-looking FW de Klerk, and a chubby Nelson Mandela, both grinning fit to bust, holding out their hands in gestures of reconciliation. Behind them, also grinning, stand two pallid, squinting figures, allegedly representing Roelf Meyer and Cyril Ramaphosa. But pride of place, in a room all of his own, is given to a smiling waxwork labelled “Oliver Tambo”. The late OR is portrayed sitting in an armchair a luxury the old man did occasionally allow himself. But there all resemblance to real life shudders to a halt. Where are those shining, jovial cheeks? Those mild, tired, ever-hopeful eyes? That self-deprecating slant of the head? Perhaps I was asking too much. After all, even the venerable Madam Tussaud’s tends to miss the mark when attempting to portray the great and the good. The PR lady was explaining that the waxwork artists had actually got OR’s son, People of the South host Dali, to come in and model the hands. Which explains why, standing back and taking another look, the waxwork tended to look more like the genial, talk-show host son than the statesman father by which I mean no offence to the son. But that was that as far as Codesa and its infamous sunset clauses were concerned. In fact the whole display, its soundtrack of revolutionary freedom songs drowned out by the dizzy clatter of one-armed bandits and the jingling of slot machines, felt like a separate sunset clause in its own right.
Which is why, I guess, the PR lady was not too far off the mark. South Africa has indeed surrendered much of its proud heritage to the get-rich-quick culture of the casino. That true life is allowed a look in at all is a miracle in itself.