Abstract
As many commentators have pointed out, South Africa’s heritage sector has undergone profound changes since democracy was introduced in 1994.2 The end of apartheid provided an unprecedented opportunity for the commemoration of past experiences that had previously been silenced and marginalized. In initiatives ranging from governmental engagement with the past, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Commission for Restitution of Land Rights and the construction of official memorial sites, to various non-government organization-driven or commercial projects involved in the ‘political economy of story-telling’ (Colvin 2004: 246), new versions of the past are produced which to a large extent are inversions of the history promoted by the former regime (Witz 1998/1999: 302). For museums and heritage projects, change has become programmatic — the reshaping of the public memory is an explicit project (Davison 1998: 47).
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Bohlin, A. (2007). Challenging Heritage in a South African Town. In: Kockel, U., Craith, M.N. (eds) Cultural Heritages as Reflexive Traditions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230285941_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230285941_6
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