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Magazine
EXPERIENCE
When memory lies in boxes
SARAH HIDDLESTON
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The Red Location Museum in New Brighton Township chronicles the struggles to end Apartheid.
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For those who never lived as part of it, it is easy to forget just how recent South Africa’s Apartheid regime is. And the wounds have not yet healed, despite its liberation.
PHOTO: SARAH HIDDLESTON
FOR THE COMMUNITY?: A spacious and airy Red Location Museum (below) is in stark contrast to the township outside.
The rusted iron township that originated from the Uitenhage Boer Concentration Camp and housed the first cell of the Mkonto Wesizwe (former African National Congress military wing) still stands on the edge of Port Elizabeth. But though much of its hi
story is told through memory boxes in an award-winning museum at the centre of New Brighton Township, these memories can hardly be relegated to the past. As we walk out we are greeted by gun shots, a barrage of screaming children running to the museum for safety, gesticulating people, one of whom says steadily and therefore somehow more ominously “Get out. They are rioting.”
Unhealed wounds
For those who never lived as part of it, it is easy to forget just how recent South Africa’s Apartheid regime is. And the wounds have not yet healed, despite its liberation. The splits are not just black and white: black, coloured, Indian, Afrikaner, white. Aside from gaggles of small children on school trips at the end of their school year, I never saw a mixed crowd in Port Elizabeth. We sleep at night with security buttons by our beds. We don’t stop at traffic lights after dark.
Not enough has changed. The air of discontent is palpable, the atmosphere in advance of presidential elections next year, watchful, tense. There are a myriad of reasons for this, among them corruption, inefficiency, faction fighting.
Our community guide, a black man from the township, offers a different explanation, though whether it is his own or whether it is what he thinks we want to hear, we don’t know: “Some people think that democracy is like manna from heaven. They don’t understand they need to work for democracy. We are good at protesting, but when the time comes to work we sit back.”
There is no doubt however that the museum conceptualises this monumentally important period of struggle for human rights. Its location was chosen very deliberately. In 1901 this plot of land was earmarked as the “model native settlement.” When bubonic plague broke out in 1903, those who sought to remake Port Elizabeth into the perfect white city found the excuse to gain government assistance to begin forced removals of blacks into New Brighton area. The iron dwellings that came up, and quickly rusted, gave it its new name: Red Location.
Hotbed of defiance
Despite being, or perhaps because it was, a place of poverty, it became a hotbed of defiance against the Apartheid regime. It was at New Brighton railway station in 1952, that Raymond Mhlaba ignored the ‘Europeans Only’ sign.
In 1953, after most of the Port Elizabeth ANC leadership was banned, Red Location became a hiding place for many anti-apartheid activists, including Govan Mbeki. Nelson Mandela himself is said to have visited in secret to declare himself High Commander of the Mkonto Wesizwe in the early 1960s. From then on, underground operations of the ANC emanated from this area.
Red Location Museum houses the community’s past in two ways. One, a chronology of the place and the other, a series of massive corrugated iron memory boxes, each of which deals with a particular theme. The concept was inspired by collections that were created spontaneously in the community in the 1990s.
The report of the museum’s curator, Christopher Du Preez, details how individuals like Mr. Hatana, who chronicled the lives of black musicians, began archives in their homes to record their lost past.
In one ‘box’ we see how the movement literally functioned underground. In most houses a part of the floor contained a trapdoor and a vent: underneath the floor members congregated. Another explains the history of local hero Vuysile Mini, who was sent to the gallows in 1964. More poignantly it contains the names of those who died, usually from a bullet wound, for which no one was held liable. Empty boxes represent those unknown. We see a photographic story of the 1985 Lumba massacre of Uitenhage, walls of graffiti, posters peppered next to each other recording the people’s struggle for their rights.
One more shows the inside of a typical living space for a family: a single bed, two chairs, a wooden dresser that holds a small primer stove for cooking, a makeshift shelf for pots and pans. The floor has whatever lino could be cobbled together; the walls are plastered with newspaper and the ceilings covered with cardboard to keep the winter out when the temperatures fall in winter. During warmer, damper parts of the year these coverings only aggravate, the mosquitoes that breed in them are apparently unbearable.
Place of contrasts
Red Location Museum is supposed to belong to the community of the New Brighton Township. In one sense the township’s ability to select those it labels heroes in the freedom struggle, its contribution to the memory boxes, the space the museum provides for workshops and for raising awareness of ongoing issues in the community (whether the excitement of the 2010 World Cup or the distress caused by HIV/AIDS) does reflect this.
But the museum, which won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ prestigious Riba Lubekin Award, cost around Rand 46 million. The living space of the memory box is still a reality for the bulk of the population outside it. I silently wonder whether the community might not have preferred new housing or better drainage. I later find out that this precisely the case, so much so that the project momentarily stalled in 2003. Hardly surprising when you remember that until 1994 blacks were denied access museums unless they worked there, and even then they had to enter through the back door.
It is clever and thought-provoking. And for once it is about more than Mandela. Somehow, though its concepts and industrial architecture are of the community, with its lofty light spaces and smooth clean lines, it doesn’t feel entirely theirs. But if it was truly theirs, would anyone from outside ever come? Many white residents of Port Elizabeth are already too frightened to come. My host was one of them until she was persuaded otherwise.
If it brings people into the township will it bring greater understanding? Will it allow the community to better raise awareness of the issues that affect them? More importantly, will it encourage those who were denied the voice of democracy to make it work for each other now? Driving away via a bumpy back route through the township to avoid the gunfire the riot has provoked, my host voices the same concerns: “If it was possible to put so much into winning the war, now we must do the same to win the peace.”
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