Suffering and the Politics of Memory

Abstract

The paper attempts a post apartheid reading of the Women’s memorial, unveiled in 1913, in South Africa. The social function of comparable memorials (eg. the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, and the Dachau memorial near Munich) is outlined in order to highlight the aesthetic ideology of the Women’s Memorial. It is suggested that the Women’s Memorial, as it stands, can be rehabilitated in a post apartheid society, if its perception can be informed by a wider knowledge of the sufferings of war. The memorial can be recontextualized so that the voices of the other, i.e. women and black victims of the long gone conflict between Boer and British, can become audible.