The renovation and upgrading of infrastructure in and around the Samora Machel Memorial site in Mbuzini, Mpumalanga, is taking place without the blessing of the monument’s creator, José Forjaz, a close friend and former colleague of the deceased Mozambican president.
The refurbishing, which is spearheaded by the Mpumalanga department of public works and is expected to cost about R11,2-million, began in June and will include an amphiÂÂtheatre, a helipad, an exhibition centre and a library.
”They’re not revamping it, they’re destroying it,” Forjaz declared.
”What’s being done goes against the original idea of an isolated monument in the landscape, which was accepted by the governments of South Africa and Mozambique.
”The memorial has a number of meanings — symbolic, aesthetic and even acoustic. By adding a lot of stuff to it, the monument will disappear.”
The memorial, perched on a barely accessible hillside, features 35 vertical steel columns — one for each person killed in the plane crash — inserted on a concrete platform that tapers into the ground. As one approaches the columns a constant, wind-induced whistling can be heard as a result of the small incisions on each pole, an eternal ”lament” for the departed.
A pit to the left of the structure contains wreckage from the plane, an obvious reminder of the incident that spawned it. The monument was built by the South African government in 1998.
Forjaz, director of the faculty of architecture and planning at Maputo’s Eduardo Mondlane University for the past 30 years, was the secretary of state for physical planning in Mozambique from 1983 to 1986.
He says he was not officially informed of the project and that he contacted the Mpumalanga department of public works in March, asking it to seek his input before ”destroying” the monument.
Forjaz says he subsequently participated in a high-level meeting on June 23 attended by the Minister of Arts and Culture, Pallo Jordan, his Mozambiquan counterpart, Aires Aly, and representatives of the Mpumalanga department of public works.
At the meeting, Forjaz says, the parties agreed to some of his terms, mostly relating to the positioning of the various proposed structures in relation to the monument.
However, a few days later, at a meeting with government representatives in Mpumalanga, Forjaz was told that the development would not take his suggestions into consideration.
He says: ”We can collaborate but if my job is to say, ‘Yes’, then that’s not the right way to collaborate. I was given no option.”
In the course of researching the story, the Mail & Guardian picked up indications of acute South African government sensitivity over the monument issue.
Contacted by the M&G, Sandile Memela, spokesÂÂperson for the ministry of arts and culture, issued a statement, which Jordan asked to be published
in full.
As the M&G was unable to comply with this request, the ministry opted to retract the statement.