9 - Yesterday's Heroes?: Canonisation of Anti-Apartheid Heroes in South Africa

Summary

Abstract

Jeremy Punt argues that the canonisation of South Africa's anti-Apartheid heroes is an important component in the construction of a narrative of a country emerging from a violent, divisive past informed by racialist engineering and deliberate processes of exclusion and othering. The icon of the struggle against Apartheid and the one who most often springs to mind is, of course, Nelson Mandela, around whom quite a hero if not a martyr cult was erected. Heroes’ discourse plays an important role in structuring memories about South Africa's past and negotiating identities in the present. Notwithstanding the ambiguities, the role of anti-Apartheid heroes and their veneration are important in underscoring new group values, restoring human dignity and self-esteem while at the same time articulating identity and acknowledging leadership and achievement. But the commemoration of heroes is also time and place bound and therefore susceptible to constant critique and adjustments as evident from recent events in South Africa.

Keywords: South Africa, canonisation of anti-apartheid heroes, victimhood, national narratives, exclusion and othering

Introduction: Towards Apartheid

In 1975 John Paul Young released a hit song, Yesterday's Hero about the fleeting nature of pop-stardom. It expresses a young man's recollection of his days of fame, together with the realisation that if he does not ‘get it together’, he will belong to the past. Although unrelated in many ways, it is a song that in some ways reminds us of the situation of South Africa's anti-Apartheid heroes. Many of these heroes, some of whom emerged already before this system of racial segregation was legally entrenched in South Africa in 1948, have since passed away and the remaining struggle heroes in South Africa, as elsewhere on the continent, are finding themselves increasingly vulnerable amidst changing local and global circumstances. Indeed, the claim to be struggle heroes or struggle veterans has in the recent past conjured up negative associations of identity and even (material) entitlement. In South Africa, and unlike some neighbouring states, its heroes (both those alive and those who have passed on) and their role in the liberation narratives often are under scrutiny and, in some cases, even criticised. Matters became more complex after the dawn of democracy in 1994, when, in the interest of national reconciliation and government policy to honour the full spectrum of the past, the anti-Apartheid heroes were inscribed alongside the country’s earlier history.