John Matshikiza In most post-revolutionary scenarios, potent symbols of the old order are rapidly dismantled and symbols of the new order hastily erected in their place.
In post-revolutionary Russia, statues of the czar would have been demolished, to be replaced by even more towering statues of Lenin and, later, Stalin. Less than 100 years later a new revolution would see Lenin’s statue in turn brought crashing to the ground. Africa’s revolutions have followed much the same pattern. In Ghana, statues of Kwame Nkrumah waving an outstretched hand towards a proud pan-African future that he had set in motion in 1957 were smashed to pieces in an orchestrated frenzy just nine years later. In Zambia, Mozambique, Burkina Faso and many other parts of the continent, streets and towns were renamed for local heroes in a surge of post-colonial celebration.
In South Africa, by contrast, monuments to the power of apartheid are evident everywhere. The Voortrekker and Taal Monuments still stand proud against their respective skylines. Krugersdorp has been renamed Mogalesburg, and DF Malan Drive has been renamed in honour of Beyers Naud, but Hendrik Verwoerd Drive still honours the memory of one of the founders of the apartheid state. We have, after all, had an inconclusive sort of revolution, stuck halfway in the past and halfway in the future. Our heritage currently favours the symbols of the old order rather than those of the forces that engaged in the task of sweeping it away. But maybe things are changing. Helmut Schneider, although Bavarian born, was living a typically white South African middle-class life in 1989 when he and his South African-born wife decided to move from Durban to the Johannesburg area. They looked at about 30 properties before settling on a large house in a quiet setting in the suburb of Rivonia. Little did they know what they were in for. Within days of the sale, a Johannesburg newspaper ran a story that was sensationally headlined “Mystery buyer snaps up plotters’ hideout”. The home the Schneiders had settled on turned out to be a remnant of Liliesleaf Farm, the rustic location where the revolutionary core of the leadership of Umkhonto weSizwe, armed wing of the banned African National Congress, had been arrested in a surprise swoop by the security police in July 1963. The trial that followed was dubbed “The Rivonia Trial” because of the location of this sensational arrest. Rivonia became a household name across the world. In South Africa, however, Rivonia became just the name of a rapidly growing suburb. Ever more stringent security laws ensured that the area did not attract any glamour attached to the idea of its being the place where Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada and others had been secretly planning an armed insurrection, within a few hundred yards of the local police station. For the Schneiders, it was a rapid learning curve. Mandela, the last of the imprisoned Rivonia trialists, was released within a few months of their taking occupation. Liliesleaf Farm, Rivonia, and all they stood for became household words once again. But few people had any idea where the famous farm stood. What should have become an obligatory stop for curiosity hunters remained a quietly obscure family home in a leafy neighbourhood. Then, somewhere towards the end of 1990 or early in 1991, the doorbell rang. Helmut Schneider, entertaining visiting relatives by the swimming pool in shorts and T-shirt, went to the gate and was confronted by the genial, now world-famous figure of Mandela, dressed in suit and tie. Mandela had been on other business in the area, and on the spur of the moment had asked journalist Allister Sparks, who was accompanying him, if he thought it likely that they could find his old haunt. And so, after some difficulty orientating themselves in this rural wilderness that had now become part of the urban jungle, they had located the spot and simply rang the bell. Eleven years down the line, there are signs all over the area directing you to Liliesleaf Farm. The Schneiders hit on the idea of capitalising on the growing fame of their home, and turned the premises into a luxury guest house, with a mini-Rivonia raid photo exhibition in each guest room. It may seem a trifle bizarre to transform the formerly spartan nerve centre of the South African revolution into luxury accommodation accessible only to the wealthy few. The farmhouse itself was in any case not the real nerve centre. The conspirators mostly stuck to the servants’ quarters behind the farmhouse and those outhouses now stand on an adjacent property, the original farm having been broken up into smaller plots in the 1960s. But plans are afoot to buy up the three adjoining residential properties where the Liliesleaf Farm buildings once stood, and reconstitute them into a popularly accessible Liliesleaf Museum and heritage site, run by the Liliesleaf Trust. When the Rivonia plotters were rounded up on that fateful July day in 1963, they were initially taken to the notorious Johannesburg Fort prison where the security police, with their famously morbid sense of humour, arranged for them to be locked up in the death cells of the even more notorious “Number Four” section for a couple of nights. From there they were transferred to Pretoria, where their trial, and their long walk into history, was to begin. The Fort itself was already replete with history as they passed through. Most of them had already been confined there for one offence or the other the Fort was the Grand Central Station of apartheid’s transgressors, be they petty crooks, pass offenders, or hard-line revolutionaries. But the Fort’s place as a natural candidate for a South African heritage site goes even further back than apartheid. “The Fort was built by Paul Kruger to lock up the British at the beginning of the Anglo-Boer [South African] War,” says Judge Albie Sacks of the Constitutional Court. “Then [when the fortunes of war turned in their favour] the British used it to lock up the Boers. When the Boers came to power they used it to lock up the blacks. Braam Fischer’s father looked after General de Wet when he was locked up there, and years later Bram Fischer himself would find himself locked up there. It is the only heritage site in the world where both Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela were imprisoned.”
The Fort, in other words, is a receptacle of 100 years of the changing history of power in South Africa. Everyone who was anyone passed through its yawning doors and a lot of nobodies as well. Today the Fort is a dead space in the midst of seething Hillbrow, its formerly threatening outer walls blackened by fires lit by Shangaan women making charcoal for sale in downtown Johannesburg. But the Fort is soon to rise again, both as a beacon for South Africa’s democratic future, and as a memory of its troubled past. The powerful design of the new Constitutional Court enfolds the main buildings of the old Fort within its embrace a past that is not forgotten, but whose hideous sting has been removed. Heritage, at last, is about to embrace us all.