Monumental Interplays: How Virtual Encounters Affect Understandings of the Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park in South Africa Open Access
Kim, Faith (Spring 2021)
Published
Abstract
At the end of legal apartheid in 1994, the Government of National Unity established the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to begin the process of reconciliation for the egregious human rights violations and abuses suffered during apartheid. One specific form of symbolic reparations proposed by the Commission was to build “memorials and monuments [that] will commemorate the victories and the conflicts of the past, … to make sure that the abuses people have suffered do not happen again.” At his Freedom Day speech at Umtata in 1999, Dr. Mandela promised the construction of a Freedom Park that would honor those who lost their lives in the pursuit of South African liberation. The project was launched on June 1, 2000 and was partially opened in March 2004.
Freedom Park is physically positioned 2.4 kilometers away from the Voortrekker Monument, a site inaugurated on December 16, 1949 to celebrate a white minority South African national identity. The ideological dialogues between the two sites and their changing meanings throughout time and history have been widely discussed in art historical scholarship on South African monuments. This thesis aims to examine the ways that Freedom Park responds to the Voortrekker Monument through its conceptualization and historical narratives. It utilizes online sources such as Google Earth, official online tours, and primary sources by the architects of the monuments to examine the monuments visually and conceptually. Ultimately, Freedom Park fails to holistically counter the Voortrekker Monument because it exhibits internal contradictions in its attitude toward the Voortrekker Monument and fails to account for the Voortrekker Monument’s new life as a politically sterile tourism site. The discussion on these two monuments has implications for monuments in other places and times, such as the current debate on Confederate monuments, the 2021 President’s Task Force on Untold Stories and Disenfranchised Populations at Emory, and Stone Mountain in Atlanta, Georgia.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………….….....1
Introduction Figures………………………………………………………………………….…...12
Chapter 1: Contextualizing the Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park ……………………13
Chapter 1 Figures ……………………………………….………………………………………..23
Chapter 2: Freedom Park’s Internal Contradictions …….……………………………………….26
Chapter 2 Figures………………………….……………………………………………………...43
Chapter 3: The Voortrekker Monument’s New Life…………………………………………….50
Chapter 3 Figures………………………….……………………………………………………...57
Conclusion ………………………………………...…………………………………………….60
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..63
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