Public debates about contested monuments have mostly focused on whether monuments should be removed, but some communities have taken another approach: erecting new monuments that present a different viewpoint or provide context lacking in the original. The largest-scale example that I’ve encountered is in Pretoria. In the first half of the twentieth century, white South Africans descended from Dutch settlers erected a monument commemorating the overland migration their early-nineteenth-century ancestors made to escape British rule in the Cape Colony. The Voortrekker Monument, completed in 1949, is an enormous granite structure perched on a hilltop just south of Pretoria. I co-wrote two articles contextualizing it with monuments in the American West (one of which is available open access) if you’re interested in learning more. Not surprisingly, given the era in which it was designed, the Voortrekker Monument represents colonization as a positive good that brought civilization to a savage world, honoring nineteenth-century settlers in part to justify the racial order of twentieth-century South Africa.
After the end of Apartheid, South African leaders envisioned a new memorial site nearby, where, as Nelson Mandela described, “we shall honor with all the dignity they deserve, those who endured pain so we can experience the joy of freedom.” Opened in 2004, Freedom Park is a complex that pursues this goal through a series of memorials, a museum, and a library housing the Pan African Archives.
While the Voortrekker Monument sets out a vision of South African history connecting the nineteenth century to the twentieth, Freedom Park takes a much broader scope. The museum leads viewers on a carefully-directed narrative pathway through seven “epochs.” The first, “Earth,” combines geological exhibits, scientific perspectives on the region’s pre-history, and Indigenous creation stories. It continues through explorations of precolonial history, European contact, colonial rule, and the struggle against Apartheid—with a similarly wide-ranging combination of artifacts, scholarly exposition, and Indigenous knowledge in each successive section. It doesn’t feel like a typical history museum—the experience is so narrative-driven that it seems almost like walking through a drama that unfolds as you progress.
The museum is just one part of a much larger complex. A short walk up the hillside takes you to a series of memorial spaces. Some, like the “Wall of Names” listing South Africans killed in conflict, fit clearly within a contemporary Euro-American language of historical commemoration.
Yet the memorial spaces are constructed of vast flowing walls of stacked stone, referencing Great Zimbabwe and other precolonial African sites, a dramatic contrast to the Voortrekker Monument’s classically-inspired design.
Others elements are entirely based on Indigenous perspectives, especially the “Isivivane,” named for the isiZulu word for a stone cairn marking a burial site or a place of spiritual potency.
Freedom Park’s Isivivane is a circle of stone pavers surrounded by nine monoliths brought from each of South Africa’s provinces. The Isivivane serves both as a symbol of union and, as the park describes, “ a place where the spirits of those who have fallen in the struggle for freedom over time can come home to rest.” Viewers are asked to follow traditional practice in their experience of this part of the complex by removing their shoes as a sign of reverence.
One of the most notable distinctions between the Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park is the rhetorical strategy that each employs in its representation of history. While the Voortrekker Monument uses narrative visual art throughout as a means of conveying its vision, representational imagery is notably absent from the memorial spaces at Freedom Park. Instead, the park relies on natural metaphors to create meaning. For example, the largest section of the memorial, the “S’khumbuto” (a “place of remembrance” in iSwati) directs visitors through a series of pathways leading past the Wall of Names and up to an amphitheater and “Sanctuary” at the top of a hill.
From the steps of the amphitheater or from the interior of the Sanctuary (an empty enclosed space designed for contemplation), visitors can look out over a pool with numerous bubbling fountain jets. Under the overhang of the Sanctuary is a circular platform emerging from the pool, housing the “Eternal Flame,” commemorating victims of conflict whose names have been lost to history. The S’khumbuto communicates almost exclusively through form and material. Viewers need a bit of introduction (whether from guides or texts) in order to understand the concept—but all it takes is a basic outline of the memorial’s intent to start to feel the significance of the space through the language of natural elements. The gently moving water, for example, readily evokes the sense of healing, purification, and reconciliation animating the memorial. There are a few symbolic elements, I believe—like the tripartite swooping forms on the inner wall of the Sanctuary, and the “wheel” shapes in the pavement alongside the pool—I didn’t see any explanation of their origin or significance, but not knowing didn’t diminish my experience (if anyone does know, though, please tell me!).
While the Voortrekker Monument tells its story primarily through narrative sculpture, it marshals the elements to reinforce one aspect of its message in a very dramatic fashion. The Voortrekkers attributed their military victory against a Zulu army on December 16, 1838, to divine intervention, and their descendants have celebrated that day as a national holiday. The monument is designed so that on December 16, a ray of light shines directly through the oculus at the top of the structure, through a circular opening in the main floor, and onto a cenotaph in the lowest level, symbolizing the divine support the Voortrekkers believed they experienced. It’s a radically different approach to using nature as a memorial medium. Unlike the open-ended contemplation that Freedom Park aims to foster, the Voortrekker Monument uses nature as a ploy in reinforcing a clearly-defined narrative.
Freedom Park is a memorial that is also, in part, a critique of memorialization. In subverting expectations about what a monument should constitute and what experiences it should facilitate, Freedom Park’s memorial spaces ask whether a different approach to meaning-making could better align with the cultural context and the values of its community. It is not the first memorial to explore new forms of visual and phenomenological rhetoric—indeed it openly references previous examples, as in its reliance on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a model for the Wall of Names. Unlike Western examples, though, Freedom Park’s critique of monumentality operates in a Postcolonial framework, seeking a new mode of commemoration that subverts colonial ideologies while engaging Indigenous perspectives on remembrance. In addition, Freedom Park stands out because it carries out its critique not as an independent vision, but in direct dialogue with (and against) the Voortrekker Monument—an archetypal emblem of traditional Western monumentality in the service of colonialism.