Description
This paper examines the material legacies of violence both through and at ex-carceral sites in South Africa and West Africa (Ghana and Nigeria). The histories of these sites are stretch chronologically from James Fort’s in Accra involvement in the Slave Trade to Constitution Hill built on the site of a notorious apartheid era prison including section number four where at points both Mandela and Gandhi were held. All the examined sites - Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, James Fort, Accra, and Freedom Park, Lagos, - are now heritage/tourist sites of some kind. This joint paper explores how the material architecture of these sites is implicated in the violence and what this means for their afterlives as sites of heritage and national memory.
Often these sites are seen to represent past ills, implicitly or explicitly contrasted the more prosperous, just, ‘now’. However, as the paper acknowledges this narrative is often undercut by the sites themselves. In South Africa, over two decades after the end of a one of apartheid little action has been taken regarding aggrieved families. In Nigeria Freedom Park portrayed as a site exemplifying victory of colonialism is also the site that held political prisoners from the post-independence struggles over political power.
This paper asks key questions about how the implication of the architecture of these sites in the violence that took place within them has been addressed or not addressed within their transformation into heritage sites. It explores the ways in which these sites continue to play significant roles in the production of political futures and asks how much these engage fully with the violence of these sites or instrumentalise them.
