Opinion piece featured in the Argus

On the afternoon of Heritage Day, the kultural upstarts kollective transformed the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, taking inspiration from the colourful and distinctive outfits of the nation’s soccer supporters. The motivation behind this installation was to challenge the idea that heritage belongs to a static past and to show that, instead, heritage is inextricably bound up with the process of looking back as the nation moves forward. Through such an initiative we hoped to communicate, in a creative way, that heritage is how we imagine – and locate – ourselves in the present. Although we were granted permission by the University our project was met with vehement criticism by DA ward councillor, Owen Kinahan.

After seeing an article about us in the Argus, Kinahan wrote a letter to the vice-chancellor objecting to the installation for two main reasons: firstly because I had been arrested for defacing public property. In 2002 I stencilled an image of a spray can along with the words ‘Free Art’ on an N2 bridge in protest against the barrage of proposed by-laws that boasted a “zero tolerance” approach to all the City’s social ills by banning everything from graffiti to the homeless. As I was a middle-class, white and supposedly upstanding member of the community this little escapade received a lot of media attention and fuelled the debate around the short-sightedness of Draconian laws that threatened to turn two already marginalized groups into criminals: the youth and the poor. People begging and living on the street are a symptom of poverty and graffiti is the voice of the youth refusing to be silenced. The protest was not just about graffiti, it was about demanding to know why our leaders were not providing viable, long-term solutions to uplift the communities that need it most. No wonder they were threatened by the writing on the wall. A few weeks after the arrest, amidst raging debate about graffiti and youth culture, Diesel did not miss the opportunity for some guerrilla marketing, and their signature back-to-front ‘E’ began appearing on the walls of the city. There were no objections from Kinahan or any other councillors for that matter.

Secondly, Kinahan objected to the Heritage day installation because he regarded it as an immature act of anarchy rather than activism or art. In his letter, he stated the following: “While I have no problem with pranks that dress up statues from time to time, I have a real issue with the likes of Delle Donne practising "activism" on the UCT campus for their own anarchical reasons. It is one thing for them to get involved in a mature debate WITH the University about its heritage but quite another to behave in this manner.” What I find most amusing about Kinahan’s statement is that it is, if nothing else, a dazzling display of ignorance and narrow-mindedness when it comes to the notion of public art. How can someone hold public office and still think that art only belongs in a gallery and therefore anything outside of that platform could not be construed as a mature act of creative engagement with the notion of heritage? More to the point, does Kinahan, as a ward councillor, not have more pressing issues to deal with?

Currently, many Cape Town streets are being considered for renaming in an attempt to erase certain elements of the apartheid legacy. As part of the process of transformation, many of these public spaces can be renamed, in so doing re-constructing our champions and values to fit more congruently with contemporary democratic South Africa. Street names can be dealt with fairly easily, as can names of airports and other physical locations. But what about statues? These more heftily spatial, weighty and personified symbols of the past are difficult obstacles to deal with. Destruction or removal seems to be an unsatisfactory cop-out that lacks both creativity and attempts to obliterate people who have left their mark in ways that go deeper than the statue itself. So what do we, as ordinary South Africans do about statues which form part of our colonial and apartheid heritages: the concrete figures that seem somewhat out of place in the contemporary democracy? Although events and people cannot be erased, they can be reshaped and resignified to cast different shadows. While I found Kinahan’s response amusing, it is also alarming because it smacks of elitism and limits the possibility for individuals and communities to explore heritage as a complex cultural resource which we all can lay claim to in empowering and meaningful ways.