Throughout the cases addressed in the book, it is clear that over the last two decades there has been a shift in ideas about the purpose of heritage and the production of public memory in contemporary South Africa. The concluding chapter argues that one of the reflections of these shifting ideas and contestations has been in the relationship between the material culture of heritage and the everyday practices of memory. The ephemeral and performative processes of memory-making explored in the book suggest alternative and at times subversive forms of inscribing memory into public space as a form of collectively authored spatial archive. The case studies suggest possibilities for a process of productive conflict in the making of memory, which this chapter argues is an essential component of a radically participatory, democratic process of constructing urban public space and public memory.

This chapter explores what happens when particular historical narratives completely lack a physical ‘home’. The Nelson Mandela Bay Amabutho was a group of young activists responsible for ‘making the city ungovernable’ during the political turbulence and state repression of the 1980s. In 2007, the group reformed as an activist organisation agitating for material and symbolic recognition of the role it had played in destabilising the apartheid state. This is a morally ambiguous and violent history that does not fit neatly into standard heroic narratives of struggle and overcoming. The chapter discusses the ways in which this history complicates heroic linear narratives of the past. It uses the case of the Amabutho to consider possibilities for inscribing complicated or traumatic memory into the urban landscape in the absence of public recognition, largely through performative means such as song, storytelling, protest, dance and the spoken word. Ultimately this history of the Amabutho and other vigilante anti-apartheid groups like them remains an unacknowledged scar in South African urban liberation history. Yet, these stories insist on being made visible, and in the minds of those who lived this history the city streets remain powerful if unmarked mnemonics for this past. This history continues to come to the surface in unexpected and embodied ways, ‘leaking’ into the consciousness of the present.

The introduction provides a theoretical framework for the book’s examination of the intersection between public memory, public space and urban transformation. In South Africa, as elsewhere, the politics of memory are inherently spatialised, both through physical traces in landscapes and through the structure and layout of urban and public spaces. The introductory chapter makes a case for the inherent intertwining of twenty-first-century spatial transformation in cities, and the transformation (and contestation) of the politics of public memory. Through this discussion, the introduction outlines the ways in which the city can be read as a form of archive, and how this reading is helpful for understanding public memory’s appearances and disappearances in urban public space. This chapter also makes the case for the study of these questions in the context of this particular post-apartheid city in the twenty-first century, and provides the rationale for Nelson Mandela Bay as an appropriate site through which to examine these questions and their broader continental and global relevance. It positions the city’s recent history in the context of South African and global politics, and argues for the value of examining and understanding this period through the lens of public memory and urban transformation.

This chapter outlines the history of the Red Location Museum of Struggle and the ‘cultural precinct’ in which it is located, a major piece of post-apartheid public architecture and a flagship heritage and arts project initiated by the city council in 1997. The Red Location Cultural Precinct is located in the oldest portion of New Brighton township, an informal settlement dating to 1902, as both a ‘developmental’ and a memory project. It proved enormously contentious from the outset. Delays in delivering promised state-subsidised formal housing alongside the museum, and lack of transparency in the allocation of these houses to residents once built, were the catalyst for protests on the museum’s doorstep between 2003 and 2005. In 2009, two new buildings were added to the precinct: an art gallery and a state-of-the-art digital library – although neither building has ever been staffed or operationalised. Further protests broke out in the course of 2013, eventually resulting in the closure of the museum. Through this history, the chapter introduces issues related to heritage, memory and the politics of post-apartheid urban transformation that structure the remainder of the book. In particular, it considers the limitations of the concepts of ‘community’, ‘participation’ and ‘development’ as they have been used in this and other urban contexts, and some of the ironies and inherent contradictions in these rhetorics of development.

This chapter focuses on memory work related to the apartheid-era forced removals that took place in the neighbourhood of South End and other city centre areas in the 1960s and 1970s. These include the South End Museum, a small community museum at the edge of the destroyed neighbourhood, as well as privately initiated memory projects by former residents such as walking tours, photographic archives, conversations, exhibitions and self-published books. The chapter includes discussion of the history and the memorial strategies of the South End Museum, a largely volunteer-run institution that survives on minimal funding or ‘official’ support. The museum and particularly its photographic and visual approaches are linked with neighbourhood walking tours, both those that are formally offered through the museum and informal tours by former residents. Martha Langford’s (2001) image of the photograph as a ‘suspended conversation’ connects the work that the photographs in the museum do to the ruins and traces of South End that the walker encounters in the landscape. Both are a means of accessing the past, requiring some form of interpolation – either textual, or in the form of conversation and verbal storytelling. In this sense, ruins, images and personal archives all function as half-complete conversations between past and present. These threads are pulled together in a discussion of the exhibition Double Vision and the events and conversations associated with it.

This chapter considers the possibilities for public art – whether monumental or ephemeral – to act as a point of access to urban collective memory, and what the politics are of these kinds of public representations and contestations. The politics of public art, public space and the visual languages used to reflect the city’s collective history also play out in relation to colonial statuary, buildings and street names. The city’s histories of dispossession, forced removal and segregation remain etched into its streets and public spaces, as is the case in many South African cities and indeed many colonial cities elsewhere in the world. In 2010, a public green space on a hill in the city centre, the Donkin Memorial, was refurbished by the Mandela Bay Development Agency. Part of this refurbishment was a public art project in which artworks were placed along a winding pathway to the top of the hill, intended to symbolise Mandela’s ‘Long Walk to Freedom’. This triumphant, branding-friendly work is contrasted with the less-visible, often ephemeral methods by which the Black Consciousness activist Steve Biko, who was interrogated by Port Elizabeth security police in the city before his death, is remembered. These figures and biographies point towards the many layers of memory which co-exist in urban public spaces, and the politics of accessing this archive of memory embedded in city streets and squares via the aesthetic realm.