In this presentation, Duane Jethro wants to explore what we are to make of South Africa’s memorial complex, to riff on Ciraj Rassool’s ideas of complexes, two decades into democracy. The paper will present and discuss a number of ruined post-apartheid monuments and memorials and critically engage with the significance of their relative ‘success’ and ‘failure’, construction and destruction, making and unmaking, and ultimately, interrogate the ideological significance of heritage as a vehicle for promoting values such as reconciliation and nation building.”

Duane Jethro is a 2017 Alexander von Humboldt Post-Doctoral Fellow based at the Centre for Anthropological Research for Museums and Heritage, CARMaH, chaired by Professor Sharon Macdonald, at the Humboldt University, Berlin. A graduate of the University of Utrecht, his work focusses on the intersections between material culture, heritage, aesthetics and the senses. His post-doctoral project, Aesthetics and Difference, looks at the work of commemorations under changing social and temporal conditions in Berlin. He has held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town and has published in African Diaspora, Tourist Studies and Material Religion.

This presentation is part of the Research Colloquium Namibian & Southern African Studies organised by the BAB and the Centre for African Studies.