It is an icy Saturday when I arrive at the Castle of Good Hope. The wind howls through the antiquated entrance room, swirling around the inoperative security scanners from the 1980s. The old woman selling tickets is shivering with cold. I commiserate with her, and she tells me they’re moving the entrance soon.
“It’s about time — we’ve been waiting 400 years,” she says wryly. It is a fitting introduction to Democracy X: Marking the Present, Representing the Past, an exhibition that’s about history, and about the sometimes uncomfortable legacy of that history.
At times you might struggle to work out what the exhibition really has to do with democracy. Consider the following items on display:
A plate made by Miss Hamelberg during the Anglo-Boer South African War, dated 1900 and captioned “Bethlehem Concentration Camp. Unglazed earthenware decorated with postage stamps”;
A necklace of lion claws mounted in gold, dated late 19th century and captioned: “Presented to Major Sam Edwards by King Lobengula when he made him a chief of the Matabele”; and
Boxing gloves given to Nelson Mandela, signed by George Foreman, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
All these exhibits are startling in the weight of historicity they carry. Each object is redolent of great struggle and sacrifice, of clashing cultures and sometimes astounding compromises.
Democracy X is an allegory for a typically South African democracy — fragmented, populated by small splinter groups with large grievances, large interest groups with small ambitions, and infinite permutations of both poles.
I was particularly drawn to the collection of postal stones, and to the carved stone taken from the pediment above the front entrance to the Castle. The latter is an oddity, a metaphor for the kind of self- inflicted wound necessary if you want to cauterise history: Why bother taking out the stone, and replacing it with a replica, when you’re exhibiting the stone in the actual Castle?
A large chunk of Democracy X concerns the more recent struggle for democracy. Along with the Mandela boxing gloves, the collection of political posters from the United Democratic Front and Congress of South African Trade Unions, and video footage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there’s a true oddity — Braam Fischer’s Orange Free State rugby jersey he wore against the 1928 All Blacks.
There is also a display of passbooks, and it is while staring at these sombre reminders of a totalitarian past that I am reminded of the importance of a show like Democracy X. A member of the First Portland Girl Guides studies the same display, and calls her friend over to look at “these old ID books”.
Her friend says: “Those aren’t ID books, they’re passbooks. Everyone had to carry them in the olden days.”
Whether she means, “everyone coloured like me”, or truly doesn’t know that white people didn’t need to carry them, is possibly irrelevant.
Democracy X gently prompts you to question the way you define “us”, and also performs the important task of remembering our nation’s history for us.