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Accepted Paper:
Invisible Heritage, Local Monuments and Social Memory On South Africa's Sunshine Coast
Dominique Santos
(Rhodes)
With a focus on the Dias Cross in Kwaai Hoek, local monuments on South Africa's Sunshine Coast emphasise heroic narratives that valorise settler colonial accounts of ocean heritage, but are in dissonant relationship with emergent re-interpretations of both tangiable and intangiable memorialisation.
Paper Abstract:
Local monuments in small towns on South Africa's Sunshine Coast in the Eastren Cape Province emphasise heroic narratives that valorise settler colonial accounts of ocean heritage. This paper explores the dissonance between tangiable monuments and material heritage with social memory of commemorative events associated with the Dias Cross at present day Kwaai Hoek, in between the holiday towns of Boknes & Bushmans River and the township of Klipfontein. Erected by Portuguese navigator Bartholomew Dias in 1488 at the final point of the voyage attempting to find a sea route to the lucrative trade markets of South and East Asia, the Padrao was reconstructed in 1938 when fragements of the original were found, and branded as the oldest memorial site in South Africa. Focusing on individual accounts of transformation of relationship with local ocean heritage memorial practices in communities classified as 'coloured' duirng apartheid, and now experiencing the revival of indigenous Khoe Khoen identities, the ongoing reinvention and reimagining of ocean heritage commemoration practices, both tangiable and intangiable, in material form and in memory, is shown to be inherently unstable and adaptable. Ongoing structures of informal segregation and limited opportunities to participate in local resident associations demonstrate the challenges inherent in transforming settler-colonial heritage.