Reading History After Apartheid in 2025

In History After Apartheid, Annie Coombes notes that monuments rarely get any attention except during times of crisis and/or transition. Writing in 2003 about South Africa’s first decade of democratic governance following the disgrace and demise of the Apartheid régime, she was quick to note how the new ANC government prioritized laying claim to the Department of Arts, Culture, Science, and Technology by creating a Commission on Museums, Monuments, and Heraldry, (soon replaced by the more cutely acronymed Commission for Reconstruction and Transformation of the Arts and Culture CREATE) to examine (and supplant) museum legislation and policy set up by the previous government. Their first object of scrutiny and scorn was a report produced by leaders in the nation’s museum sector entitled “The Museums for South Africa Intersectoral Investigation for National Policy known as MUSA.

The fervor with which the ANC moved to reshape South Africa’s cultural sector brings to mind the passionate tone of the current U.S. regime’s executive orders aimed at addressing the upcoming 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, and its re-allocation of arts and culture funding to meet its priorities (albeit those priorities are close to the opposite of the ANC of 2003). At the top of the list seems to be the creation of a “Garden of Heroes” which may or may not be  established near Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.

Intended to honor “American Exceptionalism,” the garden is meant to include 250 realistic, life-sized sculptures, listed in EO 13978. The list includes a seemingly random assortment of historical figures including inventors, entrepreneurs, Hollywood stars, political theorists, and sports legends. With the RFP having closed in July, and a total lack of transparency in the regime’s NEH, NEA, or Department of the Interior, it is unclear whether this project has any chance of coming to fruition in time for the 250th. Still, I found myself fascinated by the rhetoric of the EO— intended as a response to the iconoclasm between 2015 and 2020 which primarily affected Confederate monuments but also founding generation men whose reputations have been marred by racism or embrace of Native displacement. In a move that can read as ironic, conciliatory, or dilutionary, depending on your perspective, The Garden of Heroes list includes Indigenous figures including Sitting Bull, Sacajawea, and Jim Thorpe, as well as a variety of Black activists whose politics must be deemed acceptable to the current government (yes to MLK, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, but no to Malcolm X, James Baldwin, or Angela Davis.) Notably absent are Confederate officers like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, but Andrew Jackson is listed proudly beside his alphabetical neighbor Daniel Inouye. I’m not sure what to make of this wash of figures whom the administration wishes to honor in the realistic monumental style favored by the Chinese Communist regime, but I guess it says something about its dedication to a kind of bureaurcratic literalism that would probably be recognizable to that famous early Cold War critic George Orwell. Why must these figures have anything more in common than the fact that the administration says they're "great?" It remains to be seen how everyday Americans will view this distillation of the current regime's commitment to public art. All I know is that a gathering with Thomas Edison, Jonathan Edwards and Albert Einstein would make for some odd dinner table conversation indeed.

The Long Live the Victory of Mao Zedong Thought monument in Shenyang, photo by Noel Hanna, 2004 

It will be interesting to see how this compares with South Africa 20 years after Coombes’ book was written. Perhaps we all have more in common than first meets the eye.