Aislamiento y caracterización

For decades South Africa has been thought about and written about as separate from the rest of the world. Due to its history South Africa has projected itself as special and as unique, as a closed space detached from the rest of Africa.

(Nuttall & Michael, 2000: 1).

The quote above provides an interesting and useful entry point into the discussion around heritage resources management in South Africa. Nuttall and Michael (2000) described South Africa as a unique country arguing that other than having a long and contested history of colonisation, the country is richly endowed with a diverse cultural heritage estate (Crais, 2002; Bredekamp, 2009). It is for its cultural diversity that South Africa is often referred to as the “Rainbow Nation” (Witz, 2000; Bredekamp, 2009). On the other hand it is important to note that even though the net effect of colonialism in southern Africa is mainly characterised by marginalisation and subjugation of indigenous people, colonialism in South Africa is deemed to have been unique because in addition to dispossessing indigenous people of their lands and resources, it also introduced a system of control based on the principles of apartheid.

It is within the framework of apartheid that indigenous people in the country lost their dignity and access to resources. Policy and legislation such as the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 and Group Areas Act, as well as restricting black people to marginal areas, also created a fragmented social order (Crais, 2002; Collins & Burns, 2007).

Commenting on the impact of colonialism in South Africa Crais (2002: 9) argued that

“apartheid was modernity gone mad”. He elaborated on this by pointing out that:

The years between 1910 and 1956 saw not only the rise of segregation but also the emergence of an increasingly authoritarian and radically oppressive state that was willing to deploy its coercive might in pursuit of social engineering on a population that was increasingly denied the capacity to confront it. (2002: 9).

It is against this colonial historical background that the discourses of “social transformation”, “inclusivity” and a “nation building and unity”, in post apartheid South Africa is premised (#DocWP, #DocNHRA, & #DocSN; also see Box 1 in Section 4.5.2). The same discourses can also be traced back to a speech made by former South African president Nelson Mandela during the country’s first democratic

election in 1994. Mandela, cited in Crais (2002: 1), declared that “never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again suffer the oppression of one by another”. Of interest to this study and discussed in detail later in this chapter and carried further in Chapter 8, is how the discourses of “social transformation”, “inclusivity” and “nation building and unity” influence the orientation of heritage education in post apartheid South Africa.

South Africa, because of its history and what it has become since democracy, is in so many ways unique. The country has eleven official languages, each of which is representative of a particular ethnographically constituted culture (DACST, 1996 &

1998; Republic of South Africa, 2010a). According to a language use census report of 1996 the main languages in the country are IsiZulu, 22.9 %, IsiXhosa, 17.9%, Afrikaans, 14.0 %, Sepedi, 9.2 % followed by English, 8.6 %. Efforts to recognise, respect and accommodate all these languages in public media exist and are conspicuous within policy and legislations promulgated just after the attainment of democracy in 1994.

Besides its inherent cultural diversity, South Africa is also endowed with a rich natural (environmental) heritage. It has the third highest level of biodiversity in the world (Republic of South Africa, 2010a). The country boasts eight terrestrial ecological biomes and more than seven World Heritage sites, alongside numerous biospheres, nature reserves and national parks. The management of South Africa’s national heritage estate is the responsibility of two government departments.

Management of the country’s natural heritage is coordinated by the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism. The Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism works in partnership with independent statutory institutions such as South African National Parks and South African Biodiversity Institute, as well as with provincial conservation organisations like Cape Nature and Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal.

The management of cultural heritage at national level is the responsibility of the Department of Arts and Culture (DAC). This department also works with independent statutory institutions such as the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA), the National Art Council (NAC) and National Heritage Council (NHC), to

name a few. Figure 5 below represents the institutional framework within which cultural heritage is managed in post apartheid South Africa. Here it is important to highlight that, as discussed in Chapter Two, heritage seems to have been conceptualised as either cultural or natural within the South African context, hence the separation of its management into two government departments working with different policy frameworks, that is the National Environment Management Act and National Heritage Resources Act no. 25 of 1999. Implications of this set-up for heritage management and education practices are also of interest in this study (see Section 2.1).

Figure 5: Diagrammatic representations of heritage institutions in post apartheid South Africa

Another aspect worth noting, even if it will not be fully interrogated in this study, is that in Figure 5 above, the broken arrows are used to highlight the fact that the potential synergy between and amongst heritage institutions falling within the auspices of the Department of Arts and Culture, is not being harnessed by heritage practitioners. As such, heritage management and education practices in the country

Department

have remained largely fragmented, with different education activities undertaken within and limited to the horizons of specific heritage institutions. An example to illustrate this observation is the explicit non participation of institutions like SAHRA in the National Art Festival despite the festival being a potentially useful window for education and awareness (Lungile, T. personal communication, July 13, 2010). In Section 5.2 below, a detailed discussion of the heritage policy framework in post apartheid South Africa and the discourses that shape this framework, is provided.