Must Dias fall? The politics and history of settler heritage in Southern Africa

ABSTRACT

In the aftermath of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ Movement and the ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests, the politics of heritage has been at the centre of new intellectual debates and political demands, especially in relation to the status of problematic historical monuments. This article examines a form of colonial heritage that has remained politically uncontested as well as unexplored in the specialised literature, i.e. monuments memorialising early modern European sea voyages, in particular those pertaining to Bartolomeu Dias, credited as the first European navigator to successfully complete the maritime route to India, through the Western Cape. The article suggests that Dias can be productively seen not only as a symbol of pre-apartheid European colonisation, but more importantly as part of apartheid’s broader settler colonial narrative of Southern African history. Drawing on the example of monuments exchanged between Lisbon and Pretoria in the early 1960s, the article argues that settler heritage making played into white South African narratives of European settler ‘pioneerism’, but also served to cement politico-diplomatic solidarity and friendship between white-ruled states in Southern Africa. By unveiling the politics and history of settler heritage in South Africa, the article hopes to convince its readers that Dias, too, must fall.

KEYWORDS:

• Settler heritage
• heritage diplomacy
• white transnationalism
• Southern Africa
• Apartheid
• Bartolomeu Dias

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference “In Whose Place? Confronting Vestiges of the Colonial Landscape in Africa”, organised by the History Workshop of the University of Witwatersrand in May 2021. I am thankful for the comments received at the conference and afterwards, especially by the organizers Ali Khangela Hlongwane, Hilton Judin, and Arianna Lissoni.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ciraj Rassool, ‘Power, Knowledge, and the Politics of Public Pasts’, African Studies 69, no. 1 (2010): 79–101.

2 Sabine Marschall, ‘Targeting Statues: Monument “Vandalism” as an Expression of Sociopolitical Protest in South Africa’, African Studies Review 60, no. 3 (2017): 203–19. Cynthia Kros, ‘Rhodes Must Fall: Archives and Counter-Archives’, Critical Arts 29, no. 1 (2015): 150–65. Carolyn E. Holmes and Melanie Loehwing, ‘Icons of the Old Regime: Challenging South African Public Memory Strategies in #RhodesMustFall’, Journal of Southern African Studies 42, no. 6 (2016): 1207–23. Britta Timm Knudsen and Casper Andersen, ‘Affective Politics and Colonial Heritage, Rhodes Must Fall at UCT and Oxford’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no. 3 (2019): 239–58.

3 Annie E. Coombes, History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Ciraj Rassool, ‘The Rise of Heritage and the Reconstitution of History in South Africa’, Kronos 26 (2000): 1–21. Derek R. Peterson, Kodzo Gavua, and Ciraj Rassool, eds., The Politics of Heritage in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

4 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Monuments, Place Names and Black Lives Matter: Memorialising Captain James Cook’, Legalities 2, no. 1 (2022): 67–81.

5 Bronwyn Fredericks and Abraham Bradfield, ‘Asserting Indigenous Agencies: Constructions and Deconstructions of James Cook in Northern Queensland’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Rethinking Colonial Commemorations, ed. Bronwyn Carlson and Teri Farrelly (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan), 354.

6 Sybulle Frank and Mirjana Ristic, ‘Urban Fallism: Monuments, Iconoclasm and Activism’, City 24, no. 3 (2020): 552–64.

7 In this paper, I am opting to use the Portuguese spelling of Dias’ full name, except when I am quoting directly from English sources, where it will often appear as ‘Bartholomeu’ or ‘Bartholomew’, and ‘Diaz’.

8 Robert Musil, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author (New York: Archipelago Books, 2006), 64, 68.

9 Ross Sandler, ‘Toppling Christopher Columbus; Public Statues and Monuments’, City Law 28, no. 2 (2022): 50–6.

10 Leslie Witz, ‘Eventless History at the End of Apartheid: The Making of the 1988 Dias Festival’, Kronos 32 (2005): 163.

11 Ibid., 164–5. On bantustans, see: Laura Evans, ‘South Africa’s Bantustants and the Dynamics of “Decolonisation”: Reflections on Writing Histories of the Homelands’, South African Historical Journal 64, no. 1 (2012): 117–37.

12 Leslie Witz, Apartheid’s Festival (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

13 Much of the academic interest on Dias in apartheid South Africa can be credit to the work historian Eric Axelson, who carried out multiple research projects to map out early modern Portuguese history, relics, and heritage in Southern Africa. His research was funded by the Openheimer Institute of Portuguese Studies, of Wits University, and by the Gulbenkian Foundation. Further information on his work can be found at the Archive of Wits University and at the Eric Exelson Papers collection, held at the University of Cape Town.

14 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 7.

15 Witz, Apartheid’s Festival, 129. Voortrekkers refers to the Boer pioneers who left the Cape Colony in the 1830s, seeking to escape the British colonial rule of the Cape in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. They travelled to the interiors and settled in various parts of the territory, facing indigenous resistance and founding the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. These polities remained independent until the unification of the country in 1910, following the Anglo-Boer war. South Africa remained a British dominion until 1961, when a referendum established a republic.

16 Sousa Ribeiro, Anuário de Moçambique (Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional, 1940), 993. This source is the yearbook of Mozambique of 1940, compiled by Sousa Ribeiro and containing a plethora of information, including the transcript of speeches delivered during Carmona’s visit to Mozambique and South Africa. In this particular speech, the speaker is described as ‘President of the Pretoria City Hall’, and no name is given. It is likely that it is referring to the Mayor.

17 Ibid., 995. In this source, the speaker is described as the ‘Administrator of the Cape of Good Hope’, and, again, no name is given. Considering the banquet’s date, the Administrator would have been Johannes Hendrik Conradie.

18 Ibid., 992.

19 Ibid., 992.

20 Ibid., 993. Referring to the Louis Trichardt expedition, which led a group of Voortrekkers from the Cape Colony to Lourenço Marques, capital of colonial Mozambique. The majority of them died of malaria along the way, or upon their arrival in the city. A monument in their memory was built in downtown Maputo, where it still exists. See: David Morton, ‘A Vortrekker Memorial in Revolutionar Maputo’, Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 2 (2015): 335–52.

21 Ribeiro, Anuário de Moçambique, 993.

22 Ibid., 993.

23 Ibid., 994–5.

24 Ibid., 995. Speaker is described as the ‘President of the City Hall of the Cape of Good Hope’, and no same is given. It is likely that it refers to the Mayor of Cape Town.

25 Ibid., 995.

26 ‘Programa da visita de Sr. Exa. o Presidente da República à União Sul Africana’, Arquivo do Museu da Presidência da República, PT/MPR/AOC/CX047/005.

27 Naoko Shimazu, ‘Diplomacy as Theatre: Stating the Bandung Conference of 1955’, Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 1 (2014): 225–52.

28 Hilary Shapire and Chris Saunders, Southern African Liberation Struggles: New Local, Regional and Global Perspectives (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2012).

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31 Aniceto Afonso and Carlos Matos Gomes, Alcora: o Acordo Secreto do Colonialismo (Lisboa: Divina Comédia, 2013). Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses and Robert McNamara, ‘Exercise ALCORA: Expansion and Demise, 1971–4’, The International History Review 36, no. 1 (2014): 89–111. Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses and Robert McNamara, ‘O Exercício Alcora: o que sabemos, e não sabemos, sobre a Guerra Colonial’, Relações Internacionais 38 (2013): 125–33. Maria Paula Meneses, Celso Braga Rosa and Bruno Sena Martins, ‘Colonial Wars, Colonial Alliances: The Alcora Exercise in the Context of Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 43, no. 2 (2017): 397–410.

32 Paulo Correia and Grietjie Verhoef, ‘Portugal and South Africa: Close Allies or Unwilling Partners in Southern Africa During the Cold War?’, South African Journal of Military Studies 37, no. 1 (2009): 54.

33 Caio Simões de Araújo, Diplomacy of Blood and Fire: Portuguese Decolonisation and the Race Question, ca. 1945–1968 (PhD diss., University of Geneva, 2018).

34 Maria Paula Meneses and Catarina Antunes Gomes, ‘Interrogando a “Terceira África”: colonialismo, capitalismo e nacionalismo branco em África Austral’ (paper presented at the 5th European Conference on African Studies, Lisbon, June 27–29, 2013).

35 On diplomacy as performance, see: Shimazu, ‘Diplomacy as Theatre’, 252.

36 Alun Jones and Julian Clark, ‘Performance, Emotions, and Diplomacy in the United Nations Assemblage in New York’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109, no. 4 (2019): 1262–78.

37 Tim Winter, ‘Heritage Diplomacy’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 21, no. 10 (2015): 997–1015.

38 Ibid., 998.

39 Ibid., 1007.

40 ‘Afrikaner nationalism’ refers to the political doctrine of strong Christian, racist, and nationalism orientation that would become the ideological cornerstone of racial segregation under the leadership of the Nationalist Party in South Africa, after it came into power in 1948. ‘Salazarism’ refers to the political culture of the dictatorial regime ruled by Oliveira Salazar in Portugal. Lasting from 1933 until 1974, it was characterise by an ideological commitment to colonialism as a civilising virtue, Christian morality, nationalism, and political conservatism.

41 Caio Simões de Araújo, ‘Whites, but not Quite: Settler Imaginations in Late Colonial Mozambique, ca. 1951–1964’, in Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, ed. Duncan Money and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann (London and New York: Routledge), 97–114. Fernando Tavares Pimenta, ‘Colonialismo Demográfico Português em Angola: Historiografia, Identidade, e Memória’, Revista de Teoria e História 17, no. 1 (2017): 219–46.

42 Margarida Calafate Ribeiro and Walter Rossa, Patrimónios de influências portuguesa: modos de olhar (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2015).

43 ‘O embaixador da África do Sul entregou a Rosa-dos-ventos que decora a base do monumento ao Infante’, Diário de Lisboa, August 5, 1960, 8.

44 ‘Descerramento estátua Bartolomeu Dias’, Dispatch from the Embassy of Portugal in South Africa to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, March 14, 1960. AHD PAA 1134.

45 I thank Noeleen Murray for pointing this out to me.

46 Leslie Witz, ‘Eventless History’.

47 François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar, ‘La Croix de Dias: Gènese d’une frontière au sud de l’Afrique’, Genèses 86 (2012): 129.

48 Clifton C. Crais, ‘The Vacant Land: The Mythology of British Expansion in the Eastern Cape, South Africa’, Journal of Social History 25, no. 2 (1991): 255–75.

49 Kathy Munro, June 27, 2016 (06:02 pm), Book Review, ‘Journey into Yesterday – South African Milestones in Europe’, The Heritage Portal, http://www.theheritageportal.co.za/review/journey-yesterday-south-african-milestones-europe.

50 Roy R. Macnab, Journey into Yesterday: South African Milestones in Europe (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1962).

51 Ibid., 9.

52 Ibid., 9–10.

53 Ibid., 13.

54 Sérgio Campos Matos, ‘O V Centenário Henriquino (1960): Portugal entre a Europa e o Império’, in O fim da Segunda Guerra Mundial e os novos rumos da Europa, ed. António José Telo (Lisboa: Edições Cosmos, 1996), 153–69.

55 Presidência do Conselho, Comemorações do V Centenário da Morte do Infante Dom Henrique, Vol. 3 (Lisboa: Comissão Executiva do V Centenário da Morte do Infante D. Henrique, 1963), 253.

56 Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz, ‘The 1952 Jan Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival: Constructing and Contesting Public National History in South Africa’, The Journal of African History 34 (1993): 447–68, 448.

57 Noëleen Murray, The Imperial Landscape at Cape Town’s Gardens (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 2001).

58 Nicholas Coetzer, Building Apartheid: On Architecture and Order in Imperial Cape Town (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 94. Nicholas Michiel Botha, The Gateway of Tomorrow: Modernist Town Planning on Cape Town’s Foreshore, 1930–70 (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 2013).

59 ‘Descerramento estátua Bartolomeu Dias’, Dispatch from the Embassy of Portugal in South Africa to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, March 14, 1960. AHD PAA 1134.

60 ‘Mammoth Task of Organising’, Rand Daily Mail, May 31, 1961, 25.

61 Frank Hayes, ‘South Africa’s Departure from the Commonwealth’, The International History Review 2, no. 3 (1980): 453–84.

62 Eleanor Janet Bron-Swart, ‘With Divided Mind and Unsure Steps’: South Africa from Referendum to Republic, August 1960–May 1961 (PhD diss., University of the Free State, 2021), 82.

63 Daniel J. Feather, ‘Keeping Britain “in the Fore”: the Establishment of the British Council in South Africa and Its Contribution to the 1960 Union Festival’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 50, no. 4 (2022): 757–88.

64 ‘South Africa: Golden Jubilee Celebrations’, from the United Kingdom High Commissioner in South Africa to the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, September 8, 1960. BNA, DO/201/11

65 ‘Britain Left Out of Africa Statue’, Evening News, October 6, 1959.

66 Telegram 4615, from Embassy of Portugal in Pretoria to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, November 24, 1959. AHD PAA 1134.

67 ‘South Africa: Golden Jubilee Celebrations’, from the United Kingdom High Commissioner in South Africa to the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, September 8, 1960. BNA, DO/201/11.

68 Duma Nokwe, ‘Ex Unitate Vires’, Liberation: A Journal of Democratic Discussion 39 (1959): 11.

69 Tom Lodge, Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and Its Consequences (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 26.

70 Paul S. Landau, ‘The ANC, MK, and the “Turn to Violence”’, South African Historical Journal 64, no. 3 (2012): 538–63.

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73 On diplomatic gifts, see: Geoffrey Allen Pigman, Contemporary Diplomacy: Representation and Communication in a Globalized World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 183. On special relationships, see: Thierry Balzacq, Frédéric Charillon, and Frédéric Ramel, Global Diplomacy: An Introduction to Theory and Practice (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 29.

74 Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses and Robert McNamara, ‘South Africa and the Aftermath of Portuguese “Exemplary” Decolonization: The Security Dimension’, Portuguese Studies 29, no. 2 (2013): 227–50.

75 “Union Festival will open in Cape Town on March”, Rand Daily Mail, October 3, 1959, 13.

76 ‘Descerramento estátua Bartolomeu Dias’, from the Embassy of Portugal in South Africa to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, March 14, 1960. AHD PAA 1134.

77 ‘Descerramento estátua Bartolomeu Dias’, from the Embassy of Portugal in South Africa to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, March 14, 1960. AHD PAA 1134.

78 Letter from Henrique Queiroz, Portuguese Ambassador in South Africa, to Oliveira Salazar. March 16, 1960. AOS/CD-2, Henrique Queiroz.

79 Letter from Henrique Queiroz, Portuguese Ambassador in South Africa, to Oliveira Salazar. March 16, 1960. AOS/CD-2, Henrique Queiroz.

80 Letter from Henrique Queiroz, Portuguese Ambassador in South Africa, to Oliveira Salazar. March 16, 1960. AOS/CD-2, Henrique Queiroz.

81 ‘Forse Beeld van Dias Staan op die Verkeerde’, Die Burger, March 17, 1960.

82 ‘Descerramento estátua Bartolomeu Dias’, from the Embassy of Portugal in South Africa to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, March 14, 1960. AHD PAA 1134.

83 Andrew Baldwin, ‘Whiteness and Futurity: Towards a Research Agenda’, Progress in Human Geography 36, no. 2 (2012): 172–87.

84 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

85 Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

86 Here, I would propose, for instance, a comparative intellectual project of critiquing both South African and Brazilian memorialisations of territorial settler ‘pioneerism’, in their variations of Voortrekkers and Bandeirantes, respectively.

87 Tim Winter, ‘Heritage Diplomacy: An Afterword’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 29, no. 1 (2023): 134.