The march continues: A critique of The Long March to Freedom statue collection exhibited in Century City

At a moment in South African history that calls for decolonial perspectives on ideological and material remnants of the country’s colonial and apartheid pasts, the exhibition of The Long March to Freedom life-size statue collection at Century City, Cape Town, constitutes a seemingly contestable juxtaposition. This exhibition, that opened at Century City on 15 November 2019, is seemingly intended as a commemoration of South Africa’s struggle for freedom and a re-evaluation of former state-sanctioned versions of the country’s history. The visuality of the space that this collection currently occupies can however be described as one with a contestable relationship with the past, in which spatiality itself signifies a call to forget the past, or rather to construct a mythological version thereof. While The Long March to Freedom exhibition seemingly encom-passes calls to inclusion in the South African public sphere, Century City, as a space saturated with simulated signs, functions as a site of exclusion and privilege. This article aims to highlight tensions between “subjective” memory and “objective History” in post-apartheid South Africa, negotiating tensions of a historicality-sociality-spatiality trialectic within a site of socio-political and economic exclusion.

The erection of monuments and memorials -along with the choreographed ceremonies of commemoration centered on them and the orchestration of public participation around them -transforms particular places into ideologically charged sites of collective memory.
This relationship between monuments, memorials, and collective memory involves another dimension -the space in which monuments/memorials are interacted with, and in which monuments/memorials are located and invoke a collective memory that Murray refers to. Henri Lefebvre (1991:33) shows that space is not a neutral and natural entity, but one that is socially produced, containing the relations of its production, including Foucauldian relations of power, in 'the form of buildings, monuments and works of art'. Edward Soja (1989:76-93) shows that 'space and the political organization of space express social relationships, but also react back upon them' (Harvey cited by Soja 1989:76), and thus that space and sociality are in a dialectical relationship. This relationship becomes 'trialectic' when also considering the interplay of history with spatiality and sociality (Soja & Hooper 1993:200), implying that 'space is open to politics as much as are society and history … [and that] spatiality thus has the power to alter the future course of the historical process that produced it' (Haas [sa]:19). This paper considers the historicalitysociality-spatiality trialectic of the Long March to Freedom exhibition in the context of Century City as its current location. The paper attempts to understand notions of 'history' tied to this exhibition and to this Cape Town suburb, and relations of these historicalities with social and spatial aspects in a site meant to be 'ideologically charged [with] collective memory' (Murray 2013:71).
Oded Haas ([sa]:19) argues that the dialectics related to spatial production are tied to the colonising, and continuously controlling, powers of state and capitalism, but that these dialectics are also crucial in understanding processes of decolonisation. In other page 03 of 16 Number 34, 2020 ISSN 2617-3255 words, decolonisation cannot be separated from debates around spatiality, sociality, and also, as Soja and Barbara Hooper show, historicality (1993:200). South Africa, as a country with a complex colonial and apartheid history, saw calls for the decolonisation of public space and monuments as carriers of memory, along with calls to decolonise tertiary curricula as markers of knowledge, by the 2015 #RhodesMustFall movement.
This movement highlighted memory and public space as highly contested, an emphasis that extended to desires for changes in ideological structures that continue to privilege European and western modes of thinking, and changes in terms of physical structures that support these ways of thinking and keep a specific historicality alive in collective memory. These desires culminated in the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the University of Cape Town (UCT) campus on 9 April 2015. This removal did not only critique the place of colonial and apartheid figures in a South African present and future, but it also deconstructed the function of statues and memorials as signifiers of history, in the South African public and social space.
Brenda Schmahmann (2016:103) writes about this removal of the Rhodes statue from the UCT campus and the need for facilitating interventions with statues and objects of similar significance, she states that, While total removal of a work associated with ideologies that have fallen from favor raises a host of difficulties, it is surely also highly problematical to continue to exhibit and display such an object without critical mediation or contextual explanation of it. Lack of any intervention to such an object may well be construed as suggesting that it continues to be venerated, and overlooks its capacity to promote feelings of exclusion as well as offense.
The permanence of statues and large-scale memorials in many ways makes permanent the discourses and ideologies that the statues or memorials carry traces of. Kim Gurney (2018:34) agrees that 'monuments are rigid in their limited capacity to represent change' -an attribute that becomes exaggerated when the monument itself is rigid, immoveable, and permanent, symbolically extending these qualities of stability and solidity to the ideologies and histories signified by such monuments. Schmahmann (2018:147) considers performativity a 'creative intervention', and views performativity in relation to public art, monuments, and memorials as potentially able to negotiate meaning and significance when these objects/sites are contested, saying that 'rather than being awe-struck and transfixed by such monuments, interventions to them establish a more "democratic" relationship with their viewers'. Schmahmann's (2018:147) views on the materiality of monuments relate to Gurney's: [a] traditionalist monument will normally tend to blot out evidence that it is constructed. If including or featuring sculpture, e.g. its forms may well refuse marks or signs on its surfaces that erase evidence of changes it might have undergone during the making process. Additionally, it will not normally only be page 04 of 16 Number 34, 2020 ISSN 2617-3255 envisaged as permanent by those commissioning it, but it will also convey a sense of its own eternalness by being in materials associated with a withstanding of the passage of time -such as marble and bronze. which 'history is experienced as nostalgia, and nature as regret -as a horizon fast disappearing behind us' (Lefebvre 1991:51). The amusement park, Ratanga Junction, 2 as a specific constructed "natural" and "historical" space, opened on location in 1998, followed by the retail development of major shopping and entertainment center, Canal Walk Shopping Center, two years later (Century City [sa]c). Ratanga Junction, as an imaginary version of "natural", "uncivilised", and "dangerous" Africa, became a visual and experiential trope for locals and tourists alike, entrenching modernist narratives about page 05 of 16 Number 34, 2020 ISSN 2617-3255 the continent. Effective as a space where a myth of "the real African experience" is simulated by fake rocks, a constructed Congo river, and colonial marketplaces (masking restaurants, bars, and shops), sans any 'explicit, authentic markers and signifiers … or any association with known individuals or events' (Witz, Rassool & Minkley 1994:12-14), Ratanga Junction functioned as a bric-a-brac of historicality and spatiality. This function is produced in a trialectic that supports the social space of the entire Century City as discombobulating of exact meaning and location. The rest of the Century City suburb comprises of eight individual precincts that offer residential options, and a myriad of businesses, office complexes, and other commercial enterprises. Furthermore, the suburb houses a number of recreational spaces, and offers residents and visitors a variety of health, fitness, and entertainment options. In Century City's seemingly all-encompassing provision for any daily needs and desires of its residents and visitors, the suburb paradoxically closes itself off from the "outside". The site is marketed as a premier destination to 'WORK, SHOP, PLAY, and STAY' all in the compact convenience of one location (Century City [sa]a), to which access privileges either individualised motor transport or those able to match a high price tag for permanent stay (Marks & Bezzoli 2001). Rafael Marks and Marco Bezzoli (2001:27) explain this function of Century City: 'One can live, work and shop within the same complex without having to leave the gates of the "City" gates [sic], inhabiting a fictitious space, insulated from the troubles beyond its borders'. This emphasis on a constricted sociality, insofar as 'the social' is tied to 'the economic', results in a narrowed spatiality, accentuated by the Century City website, that condenses the complexities of spatial politics associated with Cape Town urbanity, still attesting to apartheid spatial planning, 3 into a compressed and singular representation of this location. A complex historicality is thus denied and brushed over by marketing attempts at positing this site as other than what it is: a space that 'uses ideological representations such as fantasy to obscure real relations between people and commodities' (Van Eeden 2006:42).
The seeming cohesion and physical insularity of Century City is heightened by the prominence of postmodern architecture. This feature amplifies an "inside/outside" binary between the suburb and its immediate surroundings -even exaggerating this distinction with the faux-opulence of most of its buildings, that stand in shrill contrast to adjacent built spaces and even the natural landscape of Table Mountain that can be seen from Century City. The building styles found in this suburb range from overt references to the Tuscan countryside, Classical Greek and Roman architecture, visual allusions to hybrid colonial fantasies, a Modernist minimalist use of glass and steel, references to "green architecture", and a use of what is meant to look like natural materials. The effect of this combination of historic references and visual styles is not only one of visual exclusion and seclusion of the area, but also the construction of a residential, business, and retail "theme park" whose signifiers allude to reality, and specifically, to a real historicality, but page 06 of 16 Number 34, 2020 ISSN 2617-3255 have little actual connection to it. Alice Inggs (2014:30) argues that this space proposes a 'link to the past, [its] architecture apparently derived from history, and in so doing lay claim to an aesthetic, a history and cultural heritage that never was'. As a 'perfectly descriptive machine' (Baudrillard 1994:2), Century City's blending of 'signs of the real for the real' (Baudrillard 1994:2), whether these are visual allusions to historical styles or an effect of the experience of the space, results in a kitsch over-signification, a total saturation of signs and 'mixing of seeming opposites … being offered as overtly politicized, as inevitably ideological' (Hutcheon 2001:6). 4 The spatial, stylistic, and functional paradoxes embedded in this suburb epitomise Lefebvre's (1991:129) view that 'space itself, at once a product of the capitalist mode of production and an economico-political instrument of the bourgeoisie, will now be seen to embody its own contradictions'. In its blending of allusions to inconsistent and indeterminate historical times, but no definite or concrete historical events, Century City becomes a specific kind of relic of the past, or rather of nostalgia -a compound version of mere suggestions of historicality, but reflective of a past that was not. David Lowenthal (1998:xiv) writes about the use and politics of "heritage", saying that 'debasing the "true" past for greedy or chauvinist ends, heritage is accused of undermining historical truth with twisted myth'. Jeanne Van Eeden (2006:41) describes a similar function of blending codes in capitalist spatiality; 'Commercial and leisure spaces commonly obscure historical specificity in order to create new myths'.
Perhaps such a 'new myth', constructed and underscored by the Century City spatiality, is one of an ahistorical historicality, of and in space, sans time, that may presumably last forever (Lefebvre 1991:51).
A forgetting of a history passed is not the only kind that the space of Century City encourages. It would seem that the suburb in its entirety, through its design and construction towards insularity and the closing off of its residents and visitors into a confine of consumption and economic privilege, also assists in a forgetting of the present -a historicality of current time. Entering the site of Century City, and partaking in the capitalist mode of sociality it has to offer, becomes an espousal of the inside/ outside binary so carefully constructed by the space. This is especially true of the Canal Walk Shopping Center that most overtly blends the mixed use purposes of Century City -arguably all but the 'STAY', as in live, function. The mall's design is such to lure the consumer further into the mall, disorienting them with architectural ornament, layout, and a diverse array of consumption offerings to get them to 'STAY', remain, longer. Martin with history -whether this history is in the form of "subjective" memory, or other "objective" versions, especially when related to a decolonial re-evaluation of historicality. This necessary concentrated perspective is in sharp contrast to the function and use of history in the space of Century City, where history and 'signs of the real' are easily and parodically exited, entered, and rerouted for its own purposes, arguably more aligned with superficial and aesthetic ideals, than with functions of criticality, depth, and content (Baudrillard 1994:2). Lefebvre (1991:21) says about such a function of capitalist spatial production that 'what disappears is history, which is transformed from action to memory, from production to contemplation'. Mbembe (2008) writes about similar qualities in Johannesburg-based architecture, specifically that found at Montecasino and Melrose Arch -both resembling the postmodern hybridity of "unreal" allusions to a "real" history as in the design of Century City. Mbembe (2008:62)  of time. While bearing witness to a demand that the past be forgotten, this architecture asks the spectator to forget that it is itself a sign of forgetting.
If Century City functions as a hyperreal space in which its visual form is such a 'sign of forgetting' (Mbembe 2008:62), a site in which history itself disappears (Lefebvre 1991:21), this entire location may be incompatible with a post-apartheid emphasis on the centrality of memory and acts of remembering. Or, in relation to Lefebvre's (1991:21) contention that action and memory, production and contemplation, are oppositional to each other, acts of remembering are an impossible endeavour to begin with, and the byproduct of history disappearing instead of history being kept alive in collective memory.
Frederic Jameson (1987:125) writes about what he refers to as a 'historical amnesia' as These functions of memory, learning, and self-reflection are presumably contrasted, arguably threatened, by the space the collection currently occupies, one that, as Jameson (1987:125) states and Mbembe (2008) concurs, already lost 'its capacity to retain its own past', as is a simulacrum sans history. This would mean, on the one hand, that the juxtaposition of The Long March to Freedom collection within its current spatiality may allow for a loss of solemnity, and perhaps even the impresssion of a palimpsestic exchange of 'the signs of the real for the real' (Baudrillard 1994:2), at the expense of historical gravitas. On the other hand, what is emphasised by this collection in this location, is Lowenthal's (1998:xv;128) distinction between history and heritage: [h]istory explores and explains pasts grown ever more opaque over time; heritage clarifies pasts so as to infuse them with present purposes … History and heritage transmit different things to different audiences. History tells all who will listen what has happened and how things came to be as they are. Heritage passes on exclusive myths of origin and continuance, endowing a select group with prestige and common purpose. History is enlarged by being disseminated; heritage is diminished and despoiled by export. History is for all, heritage for ourselves alone. If heritage is exclusionary and seclusionary, the economico-spatial privileges and exclusion of Century City transplant and extend to this exhibition, emphasising a call to historical gravitas itself as an impossibility. Lowenthal (1998:112) reminds that 'history cannot help but be different from, as well as both less and more than, the actual past … Above all, history departs from the past in being an interpretation rather than a replica: it is a view, not a copy, of what happened'. Any call to "real history" instead in itself becomes an exchange of 'the signs of the real for the real' (Baudrillard 1994:2), an unattainable hyperreal, and a point of view that would disguise and present itself as a 'copy'.
There may then be two major implications to conclude regarding this exhibition in its current space, and the broader associations of this juxtaposition to postmodern, postapartheid views on the place and function of history in a contemporary globalised and late-stage capitalist South Africa. The first, based on the decolonial intention of the exhibition and its call to memory and history (NHM 2019b), is a reverse of Baudrillard's (1994:13) view that 'the imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp'. The historical emptiness of Century City may be transferred onto any possible interpretation of The Long March to Freedom as "real" and "stable" -characteristics it ostensibly enters into the space with. In this instance, the 'opposite camp' -the exhibition -loses its realness in connection with the simulacrum in which it finds itself, a realness not to be rejuvenated but rather sustained in a context of decolonial emphases on formerly silenced stories. The second opposing and less naïve implication is the exact view of Baudrillard, in addition to Lowenthal, namely that the juxtaposition between the site of Century City and the contents of The Long March to Freedom exhibition is set up to mask the possibility that history itself, in this instance a history of a struggle towards freedom in a historically racially unjust society, is a hyperreal collection of signs and signifiers that allude to "the real" but with little to no connection to "reality".
The second possibility, though nearly sacrilegious to an agenda of decolonisation, is one that is arguably supported by the NHM's website and other offerings, and the way in which these offerings are presented -an espousal that calls for compatibility between commerce and commemoration. Sabine Marschall (2009:305-306)  The NHM (2019c) website markets this specific collection as offering 'opportunities for interaction and selfies, while accompanying labels give a snapshot of history' -history offered as consumption of image, turned into image, to be distributed and reproduced in the digital space sans history where selfies live. Jameson (1987:125) describes such a process as the 'transformation of reality into images, the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents'. Other planned visitor attractions of the NHM include The Heroes' Acre, 'a space for celebration, accommodating up to 30,000 people and offering VIP and conference facilities, public amenities and a central piazza connected to the Long March to Freedom' and Africa's biggest waterpark, a Waterworld theme park offering 'water-based rides, outdoor and indoor heated swimming pools, fast-food kiosks and merchandising retail outlets and will cater for up to 10,000 visitors at any one time', amongst others (NMH 2019c). These extended offerings by the NHM become connotatively connected to notions of "heritage" and "memorialisation", but within a specific spatiality of consumption and entertainment, or edutainment. This reflects Marschall's (2009:307-308) contention that 'as tourism actively appropriates the memory landscape, emphasising some memories and downplaying others, history is framed in a particular way, often in line with destination branding efforts and hegemonic political discourses'. It can be said that Century City thematises a space from a collection of visual references that overtly and mostly evidently do not belong together, to manufacture a site for the commodification of goods and economic privilege itself. In contrast, the NHM appears to set up a trope of memory and history, consuming the past for future capital gain in a theme park that commodifies not desires for material goods, but desires for justice and national belonging. The palimpsestic relationship between The Long March to Freedom exhibition and the space it currently occupies at Century City is complicated at best and contemptuous at worst, exemplifying a relationship best described by Lefebvre (1991:283): 'The whole of the past, certainly, which has been buried by memory and forgetfulness; but the reality of the flesh is also being actualized here. The living body is present, as a place of transition between the depths and the surface, the threshold between hiding-place and discovery'. What this historicality-sociality-spatiality trialectic of the Long March to Freedom exhibition in the context of Century City as its current location highlights is the need to continuously engage with "history" and "heritage" with criticality, especially when it intersects with capitalism and commodity -the long march to freedom appears to continue yet. in South Africa's struggle for freedom, but also other lesser known and international freedom fighters linked to this country's "freedom" narrative. Currently, the collection boasts 100 statues, but will be extended to include a total of 400 statues when work is complete. At the time of finalising this article it was still unclear as to when the exhibition will end at this location, although Computicket, as official ticket sellers to the procession, only lists visiting options until 30 November 2020.

Notes
2. The Ratanga Junction amusement park opened on the Century City premises in December 1998.
Some of its best known and most popular rides included the Cobra rollercoaster, the Monkey Falls water ride, and the Diamond Devil Run train ride. The amusement park was designed to, through the arguably haphazard combination of visual signifiers, create an impression of a fantasy of the colonial African jungle -an image supported by the park's tagline, "The wildest place in Africa". Ratanga Junction closed its doors on 1 May 2018, and the future use of this space is still contested.
3. The African Centre for Cities (ACC 2019) explains that a 'rapid and poorly governed urbanization in Africa points to a profound developmental and philosophical crisis … There is hardly any sustained scholarship on the existential and cultural dimensions of African urbanism'. Owing to segregated apartheid planning, this is especially true of the complications of space in Cape Town as urban area.
This city has become a monument of apartheid social and spatial engineering, that even 25 years after South Africa's first democratic elections, still carries traces of the country's and the city's past. Patterns of segregation still underscore Cape Town's spatial planning and socio-economic conditions and development, and have come to dominate current debates about the city's use of space in gentrified and gentrifying areas, such as Woodstock and Salt River.
4. Indeed, Inggs (2014:30) describes this substitution and signification: 'Century City -a postmodern consumer complex within the façade of a pre-modern Italian city within the Cape Town peri-urban -is a struggle of contradictions, yet as a simulation it blurs the difference between the "true" and the "false", the "real" and the "imaginary" … Today, says Baudrillard, simulations (the map) are no longer generated by a "real" original (the territory), but by other simulations -now it is "the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map". As Cape Town's historical architecture is slowly eroded and replaced, it is the architecture of pseudohistorical structures like Century City … that remains'. Marks and Marco Bezzoli (2001:27-28) discuss three prominent themes highlighted by the space and function of Century City: 'The first locates Century City in the global phenomenon of marketled urban development that has overtaken Cape Town, where all aspects of urban life continue to be commodified … The second theme explores the implications of this new private city, a large zone of privilege and exclusion. The third theme to be explored is that of urban identity and local heritage'. As explained above, the economic politics and exclusions inherent to the space of Century City entails an identity of the urban individual that is inextricably tied to globalised commodification and a capitalist mode of a production of citizenship, and the rights this may afford an individual.

Rafael
6. Poststructuralist re-evaluations of history remind that history is a constructed, selective, and subjective representation of social, cultural, economic, and so forth, relations. Michel Foucault (1977:27) speaks to this notion in stating that 'there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute … power relations'. This holds true for the construction and dissemination of knowledge in the field of history too, and it is this decentralising and deconstructive view of history that relates to decolonising and postcolonial emphases.