Interpretation and presentation at Wildebeest Kuil
The 31 Battalion Military Exhibition
On the 18th of May 2013 the exhibition opening of Angola to Platfontein: !Xun and Khwe and 31 Bn [Battalion] was held at Wildebeest Kuil. Over a hundred people were in attendance, many of whom were former members of the SADF, including some current army and naval personnel. San members of 31 Battalion were also present along with a small number of journalists. Extensions for this wing began in March 2012 with funding provided by the National Lottery. The McGregor Museum’s conflict historian, Sunet Swanepoel, was responsible for putting together the exhibition. One time 31 Battalion Commanding Officer Scholtz van Wyk was instrumental in the inception phase of the project, further loaning the museum a few items of his personal collection for exhibition (Morris, interview, May 2013).
The exhibition consists of wall panels with script and photographs depicting soldiers in pose, scenes from the military camps and paraphernalia such as flags and medals. One of the panels reads “[t]o assist the !Xun and Khwe in adjusting to their new environment, the military built a community centre, opened on 26 May 1992. It provided basic adult education as well as needlework and cookery classes. An art project was also started” (Swanepoel, 2013). The
58 The film was made in a time when that hope was alive.
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paternalism evident here persists throughout the exhibition and is pointedly emphasised in the final sentence of the last panel which reads: “[f]inally in December 2003 military vehicles brought the majority of the !Xun and Khwe to their newly-built homes at Platfontein” (ibid).
The military vehicles, and not the !Xun and Khwe, are the subject of this sentence. The San are in fact the object upon which the act of ‘bringing’ is applied.
In its abandonment of sources (a tenet of heritage presentation), the information provided is conveyed as fact. The narrative thus becomes, not a particular version of history, but The History. This is in addition to the lack of voices of San soldiers and their dependents who had experienced life in the military camps and who are now living at Platfontein. In this disavowal, the treatment of the San as under the care and authority of the white military leadership is perpetuated. The San are narrativised as supporting cast members to the story of their white superiors and the exclusion of !Xun and Khwe voices and perspectives is critically evident. An aspect of this exclusion is the fact that, to garner their consent, copies of the information panels were sent to community leaders in English, a language in which they are not fully adept. Afrikaans copies were later put into booklet form for the community when the exhibition was ready to be launched. Under two-hundred booklets were made; some of these copies were also available at the opening ceremony (Fieldnotes, May 2013).
During a visit to the exhibition my colleague Julie Grant called my attention to a photograph of three children sitting in a field together with an SADF aeroplane in the distance (Fieldnotes, May 2013). The caption read, “Zelrine van Wky, daughter of Scholtz van Wyk, the last officer commanding 203 Bn, playing with San children oblivious to the momentous processes of re-settlement going on around them” (Swanepoel, 2013). The white child and her father are named, thus securing her identity, while the San children remain unknown and unknowable. They sit with their backs to the camera while the Van Wyk child faces the lens;
they are secondary to her and, through their non-individual status and homogenous treatment, become representational of all San children at the army camps. This is in contrast to the exhibition’s title which foregrounds the !Xun and Khwe and suggests that the narrative is theirs. The exhibition is also largely fact-based with information easily gleaned from reference books; clearly absent are the personal stories of still-living San soldiers or their dependents who remember life in the military camps. This is antithetical to Freeman Tilden’s (1977) proposition of revelatory heritage interpretation (cf. Chapter Three) which underlines
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that the interpretation should be more than merely factual but rather that it seek to reveal meaning and relationships particular to the history and culture on display.
The exhibition likewise ignores the experience of women in the camps, impacts of the moves across national borders, the effects of war on the community, and family life within the camps. David Robbins (2007, c. 2004) and Ian Uys (1993) have described some of the impacts of camp life on !Xun and Khwe women and families (cf. Chapter One). A cultural breach was beginning to develop between the soldiers and children on the one hand, and the women on the other (cf. Uys, 1993). While boys in the camp were learning “bush crafts” the girls were taught knitting and needlework marking the beginnings of the camp’s home industry (1993:47). At the Omega camp, while a few of the women were involved in the home industries, camp hospital and kitchen, the majority continued to live much as they had always done while their husbands and children were becoming increasingly ‘modernised’.
Annatjie Boets, wife of the commanding officer at the time, said in an interview with Nico Roos, that the San “are an interesting nation. The woman is the leading person in the house.
The men are very frightened of their women, unless they have some Dutch courage” (cited in Uys, 1993:111). Sergeant Sam Betteridge of 201 Battalion echoed this when he noted that:
The younger children are ahead, then the soldiers then the women. This has caused a problem as the woman is normally the head of the house. Now she finds that her child speaks Afrikaans and English, her husband has a rifle and drives a vehicle and she stays where she is. She feels that her status is being threatened. (cited in Uys, 1993:112)
This change in household hierarchy is evident in Platfontein today. Describing a meeting held with parents of the children responsible for a fire that caused extensive damage to Wildebeest Kuil’s rock art area and boardwalk in 2010 (discussed further in the chapter), Morris noted that the children, all younger than thirteen, do not attend school and are from single-parent households where they act as an interface with the outside world for their mothers who are illiterate and speak no Afrikaans (the language most widely spoken in the Northern Cape) or English (Interview, March 2011). The fathers were not present; according to his impressions at the meeting, Morris observed that they were “possibly not known” (ibid). In an act of neo- gathering some !Xun and Khwe women frequent the nearby city landfill in search of food and
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clothing (cf. Dicks 2011; Soskolne, 2007). While food poisoning and sickness are a concern, these women feel they have no alternative to feed their hungry families. An argument could be made for this act as a show of agency, nevertheless, it is quickly annulled by the counterpoint that these women and the extended community express a sense of limited control of their lives; it is possible that “[t]hey have been conditioned for dependency on people they perceive as stronger” (Uys, 1993:11).
Once in Schmidtsdrift, the San became disillusioned with the military. They complained that the promise of housing was not fulfilled. They now had to make do with canvas tents while they had left timber dwellings back at Omega. As described in Chapter One, Anna Maria Mahongo, wife of !Xun community leader Reverend Mario Mahongo, had this to say:
The army told the minister to move because SWAPO [the South West African People’s Organisation] were going to kill us. We were shown videos and books on how SWAPO killed people. It is good that we were brought here as we are still alive, but I was not happy to leave my possessions and home behind. Now I have nothing but a tent and after I clean everything it soon becomes dusty and dirty again. (cited in Uys, 1993:250)
Thirteen years after the relocation to South Africa, Hennie Swart59 was witness to a particularly unsettling exchange between community members:
I found some photographs that had been taken at Omega and showed them to a group of !Xun and Khwe. At first there was some excitement. Young men and women recognising themselves as kids; or a relative who had since died; and so on. And then—it was shocking—one by one they began to weep. I had never known what it must be like to be homeless. Then I knew. Omega meant so much to them, that dismal army camp, and the wrenching away from it was so awful. They showed me one young girl in the photographs. Her baby had died just hours before the aircraft left.60 She was too terrified to speak. She flew all the way to South Africa, and came all the
59 Hennie Swart was a teacher and educational psychologist who worked at the school in Schmidtsdrift and later moved to Platfontein to manage the affairs of the Communal Property Association. At the time of writing Swart was contracted as a project manager at SASI.
60 !Xun community leader, Mario Mahongo, has queried the accuracy of this statement, saying that he was not aware of the event (in Robbins, c. 2004:19). He did, however, concede that, since the people were moved in several groups, the burial of the baby could have taken place in Schmidtsdrift without the knowledge of community leaders (ibid).
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way down to the tents at Schmidtsdrift with the dead baby clutched in her arms. To catch sight of such dislocation is almost unspeakable. (cited in Robbins, c. 2004:19)
The community’s sense of dislocation was deepened with the disbanding of the battalion.
Some of the soldiers were transferred to other units in different parts of the country, leaving their families at Schmidtsdrift. This was cause for a greater sense of loss and alienation.
While life in the tented camp went on, it remained a life of instability; the community were
“left without a centre, without a purpose, certainly without houses, and perhaps without hope” (Uys, 1993:23). More than two decades later a similar sense of hopelessness pervades.
Uys (1993) and Robbins (2007, c. 2004) have documented fierce debates around the conscription of the San soldiers by the SADF. Nevertheless, the exhibition at Wildebeest Kuil is celebratory and none of the above is mentioned. A colleague of mine, a Chinese national, observed during a visit to the exhibition that the !Xun and Khwe had had a “glorious past”
because “they were soldiers” (Personal communication, 9 June 2014). Military life is romanticised in the exhibition in a nostalgic gazing upon the past. This corresponds with a selective history promoted by typically patriarchal power bases that focus on ‘great men’ and overlooks “women, children, disabled groups and ethnic minorities, who are typically depicted (if at all) as lending support to the male, central figure” (Timothy & Boyd, 2003:262; cf. Hubbard & Lilley 2000; McLean 1998).
Heritage, as an essentially political phenomenon, is thus the story of history recounted from the perspective of the controlling, dominant power base (Hall 2000, 1997, 1994). It is a history of “hegemonic notions about class, ethnicity and gender” (Timothy & Boyd, 2003:262; Waitt & McGuirk 1997). Museums, monuments, historic buildings, tourism landscapes, and other public spaces are thus crypts for the conservation and representation of particular ideologies (Hall, 2005). Heritage is shown to be about power and control, and is often utilised by governments “to achieve some measured ends and to demonstrate their authority over people and places” (Timothy & Nyaupane, 2009c:44; cf. Kim, Timothy & Han 2007; Timothy 2007; Timothy & Boyd 2003).
The opening ceremony of the military exhibition was steeped in this spirit of remembrance.
The San soldiers expressed a sense of personal pride at their involvement in the military.
However, when interviewed a few days after the opening ceremony, a community leader
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brought to light his own sense of censorship when he said that he would not want the exhibition to include stories of how some of the San soldiers were ill-treated by white military leadership in the camps (Anon, interview, May 2013). The San soldiers’ relationship with the military is thus one of conflicting and competing sentiments. During his speech at the opening ceremony !Xun traditional leader Reverend Mario Mahongo expressed an array of emotions. There was pride over the exhibition and gratitude to those involved in its creation but there was also tension and unease. Mahongo noted that he considered the term
‘Bushman’ to hold negative connotations. Boesman [Afrikaans for Bushman] used in the camps as a prefix when describing a certain captain or sergeant was a painful reminder to him of the still prevalent racial separation in the army—a much contested perspective in some circles. He went on to say that the !Xun and Khwe are viewed by the South African government as foes having fought for and not against apartheid. His entreaty was that this view should be changed; the San should be remembered as having fought for the country. He urged the military to remember their San colleagues suffering in Platfontein and ended his speech by saying that “the war is now over, it is a time for peace and all must partake in this peace” (Fieldnotes, May 2013).
This speech, while rife with tension, received a hearty applause. After the formalities, standing in line at the buffet table, I noticed a veteran San soldier who was having difficulty keeping food from falling off of his piled-high plate (Fieldnotes, May 2013). I saw another veteran San soldier across the room similarly struggling with his buffet plate. Whether their motivation was hunger or food insecurity, their ‘difference’ was marked by their piled-high plates, a reminder that beyond the pageantry and ceremony of the event these soldiers and their dependents constituted a poverty stricken people. At the same time, dependency on the military and/or state has, to a large extent, stripped this community of agency.
Both the introductory film and the exhibition leave the visitor with a sense of the !Xun and Khwe coming to terms with the past and forging ahead to a better future. Roshi Naidoo refers to such presentation as ‘sleight-of-hand’ such that “the project of modernity appears alive and well and functioning for the gradual betterment of all” (2005:41). Consumers of such an interpretation are encouraged to view the present condition of the !Xun and Khwe as stable and possibly content. The exhibition (more than the film) reinforces the idea that the upheavals of war have been all but resolved for the !Xun and Khwe and that the SADF
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played a principal role in making this happen. In this way political ideologies and prevailing structures are not only left unassessed but are celebrated.