The once beloved country
I w as not expecting to find Cecil Rhodes’s head reattached. This was accomplished quietly, without the international media attention stirred by the statue’s decapitation in 2020. The reborn bronze gained internal steel rods, industrial cement, an alarm system, a gps tracker, and other very South African security features to discourage further attacks. And so the “immense and brooding spirit” once again gazes pensively from Devil’s Peak, above the University of Cape Town, toward the great African hinterland.
On my recent visit to the monument, the atmosphere was modulated by a curvaceous blonde glamour model and three photographers engaged in a lingerie shoot among the columns of Herbert Baker’s 1912 memorial. I was the only other visitor, and we all acknowledged each other cheerfully before continuing to seek out the best camera angles; I of George Watts’s famed statue Physical Energy at the foot of the monument, they of the model’s differently splendid bottom.
“Why are you so obsessed with all this old stuff?” my host later asked. I had just admitted my rapture at the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, another of the country’s less anodyne tourist attractions. It was an attitude I’ve encountered many times among young, white, especially affluent South Africans. The country offers obvious pleasures: game viewing, trail running, hiking, gastronomy. A brief respectful visit to the Apartheid Museum might be dutifully encouraged. But any interest in the past that extends beyond this is unwholesome and arouses distaste. It is the South African equivalent of German Geschichtsmüdigkeit : “the weariness with history.”
