Remembering the decolonial nation: the M.T. Steyn statue as a site of struggle.

Abstract

The study tracks the meaning/s of the M.T. Steyn statue, that stood on the grounds of the University of the Free State main campus, through two contextual periods: against a fledgling Afrikaner nationalism at the time of the statue’s unveiling in 1929, and against the cries for transformation and decolonisation associated with the #RhodesMustFall movement that swept through South African campuses in 2015 and which eventually led to the relocation of the statue. This is done to understand how a cultural artefact embodies different meanings over a range of social and historical contexts, which, when read against these contexts can express and illuminate them in new and insightful ways. In this way the meaning/s of the statue is explored as a key in developing an understanding of how ‘heritage’ was and is constructed in the different periods in question. The research utilised theories of representation (Hall, 1997) combined with the notion of articulation, as used by Stuart Hall (1996), that imagines discourse as made up of unities consisting of ‘articulated’ elements that are both ‘structured’ and spoken’ at the same time. This is used to describe ‘heritage’ as consisting of articulated notions of culture, identity and the past that transform over time and which, at different times, present different conceptualisation of the nation, who belongs, what culture is worth preserving, and what past constitute the past of the ‘nation’ i.e. that constitute the mirror in which a nation or a group can recognise itself. The study found that the statue of M.T. Steyn articulated an Afrikaner nationalist discourse, culturally expressed as a drive towards endogeneity and ‘ownness’, at the time of its unveiling in 1929, and the antithesis of what the #RhodesMustFall movement articulated as its own modus operandi in 2015, namely decoloniality. Furthermore, a relationship between what both these drives for cultural transformation embodied became evident when ‘reading’ the two periods together in an attempt to gain insight into a pre-dominant construction of heritage in contemporary South Africa. This ‘reading’ suggested that an opportunity to re-articulate the statue in a productive and affirmative way, that could resonate with a broader, outward looking, decolonial struggle many could identify with, got lost with its relocation. The contribution of the research to the study of ‘heritage’ in South Africa was using the theory of articulation to understand the landscape ‘holistically’, i.e., that included both a discursive and semiotic approach. Furthermore, by exploring the ‘meaning’ of a particular statue that had not been extensively researched in any academic text, hopefully provided new insight into the contemporary heritage landscape, embodied in a particular cultural artefact.