Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- Table of Contents
- Acronyms and Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Foreword
- Preface
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Contradictions in Memorialising Liberation History
- Chapter 2 Memorialisation as a Force for Radical Transformation: The Case of Freedom Park in South Africa
- Chapter 3 Freedom Park as a Place of Memory: Symbolic Reparations, Indigenous African Knowledge Systems and Reconciliation
- Chapter 4 Memory and Socioeconomic Transformation in South Africa
- Chapter 5 Homeland Manifestations—A Postapartheid Denigration of Social Cohesion
- Chapter 6 The Historical Transformation of Male Initiation Politicalcultural Practices and its Role in Nation-Building: The Case of the Western Cape Province
- Chapter 7 Memory, Knowledge and Freedom: From Dismemberment and Re-Membering
- Chapter 8 Memory for Peace in War: A Case of Remembering and Rebuilding Postapartheid South Africa
- Chapter 9 Mending our Wounded Souls: Towards the Possibility of Healing and Social Cohesion
- Chapter 10 Reconciliation and Social Justice in South Africa: Still the Unfinished Business of the Trc?
- Chapter 11 Rising Violence: The Crisis of Broken Individuals
- Chapter 12 Social Memory through Posthumous Remembrance
- Chapter 13 Memorialising the Community Public Health Legacy of the Ribeiros
- Chapter 14 The Place of Memory in the Life and Work of Desmond Tutu
- Chapter 15 Memorialising the Untold Stories of Women, for Transformation
- Chapter 16 On and of Memories: Understanding Women’S Stories, Stitched Perceptions and the Rupture of Violence in their Lives
- Chapter 17 Memories of, and Reflections on, Broadcasting in South Africa
- Chapter 18 Press Freedom 25 years Postindependence: Challenges and Solutions for the South African Model
- Chapter 19 Universities of Science and Technology for Rural Development as Freedom and Justice: The Politics of Evidence and Decision
- Chapter 20 The Centre, the Periphery and Selfhood: Rethinking the Role of African Languages for Radical Transformation
- Chapter 21 Memorialising the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania
- Chapter 22 To Sing or not to Sing: The Protest Song in South Africa Today
- Chapter 23 Shared Dreams: Creative Art—From Collective Memory to Social Transformation
- Chapter 24 (Social) Anchor as Opposite to Tumbleweed: The Naming of “Things” As Memory and Anchor, Repression as Erosion and Dislocation
- Chapter 25 Memorialising Freedom During Covid-19 Lockdown in South Africa
- Chapter 26 The Political Economy and Ethics of Global Solidarity in Covid-19
- About the Contributors
Chapter 23 - Shared Dreams: Creative Art—From Collective Memory to Social Transformation
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- Table of Contents
- Acronyms and Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Foreword
- Preface
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Contradictions in Memorialising Liberation History
- Chapter 2 Memorialisation as a Force for Radical Transformation: The Case of Freedom Park in South Africa
- Chapter 3 Freedom Park as a Place of Memory: Symbolic Reparations, Indigenous African Knowledge Systems and Reconciliation
- Chapter 4 Memory and Socioeconomic Transformation in South Africa
- Chapter 5 Homeland Manifestations—A Postapartheid Denigration of Social Cohesion
- Chapter 6 The Historical Transformation of Male Initiation Politicalcultural Practices and its Role in Nation-Building: The Case of the Western Cape Province
- Chapter 7 Memory, Knowledge and Freedom: From Dismemberment and Re-Membering
- Chapter 8 Memory for Peace in War: A Case of Remembering and Rebuilding Postapartheid South Africa
- Chapter 9 Mending our Wounded Souls: Towards the Possibility of Healing and Social Cohesion
- Chapter 10 Reconciliation and Social Justice in South Africa: Still the Unfinished Business of the Trc?
- Chapter 11 Rising Violence: The Crisis of Broken Individuals
- Chapter 12 Social Memory through Posthumous Remembrance
- Chapter 13 Memorialising the Community Public Health Legacy of the Ribeiros
- Chapter 14 The Place of Memory in the Life and Work of Desmond Tutu
- Chapter 15 Memorialising the Untold Stories of Women, for Transformation
- Chapter 16 On and of Memories: Understanding Women’S Stories, Stitched Perceptions and the Rupture of Violence in their Lives
- Chapter 17 Memories of, and Reflections on, Broadcasting in South Africa
- Chapter 18 Press Freedom 25 years Postindependence: Challenges and Solutions for the South African Model
- Chapter 19 Universities of Science and Technology for Rural Development as Freedom and Justice: The Politics of Evidence and Decision
- Chapter 20 The Centre, the Periphery and Selfhood: Rethinking the Role of African Languages for Radical Transformation
- Chapter 21 Memorialising the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania
- Chapter 22 To Sing or not to Sing: The Protest Song in South Africa Today
- Chapter 23 Shared Dreams: Creative Art—From Collective Memory to Social Transformation
- Chapter 24 (Social) Anchor as Opposite to Tumbleweed: The Naming of “Things” As Memory and Anchor, Repression as Erosion and Dislocation
- Chapter 25 Memorialising Freedom During Covid-19 Lockdown in South Africa
- Chapter 26 The Political Economy and Ethics of Global Solidarity in Covid-19
- About the Contributors
Summary
Revolution is a highly conscious act. It permits the unthinkable to be thought, the inconceivable to be imagined, and the unspoken to be shouted out loud.
– Albie Sachs, Images of a Revolution (Murals of Maputo)
Since the dawn of humanity—which happened in Africa—the creative arts have enabled people to understand and share experiences, and to build new perceptions and imagine visions of the future. African visual arts are painted and engraved on rock in over 200 000 sites, the earliest dating back 73 000 years.
Freedom Park aims to honour and commemorate our liberation struggle and humanity. One major aspect is to record and grow African knowledge systems, of which Africa's creative arts form a foundational pillar. To fulfil this mandate, Freedom Park must become a leader in understanding and positioning Africa's past and current creative arts as engines of our social transformation; rewriting the canon of global art to foreground Africa's creativity, as both a driver and an outcome of humanity's struggle for liberation.
To begin, we must challenge how, today, decades after the official end of colonialism and apartheid, the global “art world” still ignores Africa's rich legacy of creative expression. As Nigerian art historian, Chika Okeke (n.d., p. 1), points out:
African modern art … has been an anomaly on the map of twentieth-century artistic modernity. It has been with us from modernism's inception, and yet, in a kind of cyclical ritual, it time and time again has seemed to need validation within the study of twentiethcentury art.
It sometimes seems that we keep circling back to the comment attributed (possibly falsely) to Picasso: “African art? Never heard of it” (Bala, 2016).
That lacuna exists because the colonising powers systematically undermined and silenced Africa's creative expression. They dismissed precolonial art as “curios” and “barbarism”; rejected creative expressions of anticolonial resistance; and installed— and maintain—a global art industry comprising predominantly white, rich and male first-world buyers, collectors and commentators.
We need to assert both the existence of African art, and the validity of the distinctive cultural theories underpinning it.
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- Social Memory as a Force for Social and Economic Transformation , pp. 279 - 290Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2021