All living things have memory. Memory serves as a conveyor belt ferrying knowledge from the past to the present. We avoid mistakes of the past by preserving our learnings, and strive to do better through accumulated knowledge, innovation, determination and vision.

Forgetting accumulated knowledge weakens current capacity to scale new heights in human development. Optimism about the future accompanied by judiciousness is an essential ingredient and acts as a catalyst in the social development process. 

So, what we do today as a country must be informed by memory, else we stumble and perish in a failed state. If what is said about the prudence of remembering the past is true, then references to the past must not be denigrated as an unhealthy fixation that has no value in charting the future, as many are wont to say. 

Opposition to memory is often displayed by those who seek to conceal knowledge about their direct or indirect inheritance of social status and its associated benefits. Denigration of memory of the bitter past endured by fellow citizens is a form of denialism that is also designed to manufacture “alternative facts”. Anti-memory advocacy is hypocritical, specious and counterintuitive, as evidenced by the ubiquity of monuments and memorials all over the world, including here in South Africa.

In reality, those who counsel the victims of historic oppression to erase their memories are the same people who denounced the destruction of colonial and apartheid monuments during the #RhodesMustFall student protests at South African universities (similar protests took place in the UK and US). Consistency in their argument would be to welcome the destruction. In short, colonial and apartheid symbols are sacrosanct, worthy of eternal celebration.

Bizarrely, the victims do not deserve memories of their own. In his “They Are Burning Memory” essay, Njabulo Ndebele meticulously dissects the throbbing undercurrents that lie precariously under the surface and if scoffed at will erupt periodically.

Read in Daily Maverick: “Flight or fight? The quandary students face — retreat abroad or actively defend our hard-won democracy”

I have no doubt that these assertions will draw the fury of the anti-memory fire brigade defenders whose fidelity to the inheritance is predictable. The above reflections are instigated by the vehement opposition expressed by some in our society whenever reference is made to the historic debilitations that haunt the present.

Prudence dictates that protestations about the past not be allowed to deter the achievement of general welfare; in essence, they are wilful diversions that provide no effective solution except to ensure the preservation of parochial interests. Of course, in a democracy, conversation and debate must take place, for that allows for the vetting of ideas, and the opportunity to imagine new possibilities.

That the majority of people in South Africa experienced oppression and suffered severely under apartheid is an objective and incontestable fact; it is by no means a figment of the imagination. Furthermore, let’s remember that genes that carry the identity of our species are transmitted from generation to generation and that is memory; and so, cultural and social capital are transmitted similarly from generation to generation (other things being equal).

What must be consciously avoided is the singular fixation on the horrific past without simultaneously being motivated or seized by vistas of a just, wholesome future. It should therefore follow that the future (beginning now) must be the negation of all the ills that characterised the past.

It bears remembering that memory dates back to time immemorial, it is multifaceted and multilayered (personal, familial, historical, social, political, etc). There are museums and monuments that are embodiments of the heritage of societies. Memories are often curated in physical structures, as in museums and monuments, but sometimes they are ideational, as in the collective experiences of a people, especially if the experiences were traumatic.

I will not attempt to undertake a sweeping survey of its inherent complexity. For ease, convenience and economy, I will confine the following brief observations to experiences during my lifespan; that is, my remembrances of moments that seemed immutable but over time could not resist the inexorable surge of the moral universe in its relentless pursuit of justice, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jnr.

Wallaces, Smiths and Kissingers

It was in my teen years, in the Sixties, that I began to have a good grasp of the immensity of the oppressive environment that surrounded our country. That awareness was not only local in origin but was echoed at the global level.

On the global front was the bravery of the US civil rights movement in which protesters were murdered, bitten by vicious police dogs, spat at and stoned by white citizen groups. Amid the protests for justice, then Alabama governor George Wallace bellowing to his followers in 1963, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” remains present in my memory. Nearly a decade later, Ian Smith, then prime minister of Southern Rhodesia, declared: “I don’t believe in black majority rule ever in Rhodesia, not in 1,000 years.”

These dire prognostications seemed aligned with the scenarios outlined in the National Security Council Study Memorandum 39 which considered various foreign policy options under the Nixon administration and was supervised by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Option 2 in the memorandum preferred greater communication with the white minority governments undergirded by an implicit assumption that the minority was there to stay.

It is clear now that these prognostications were self-delusional. Interestingly though, UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had earlier picked up a whiff of what was to come in his 1960 speech delivered in Cape Town, when he declared: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”

Visit Daily Maverick’s home page for more news, analysis and investigations

The current dispensation with all its imperfections was born in spite of the firm beliefs that nothing would ever change. Inexorable human evolution and its yearning for freedom has made mockery of the George Wallaces, Ian Smiths and Henry Kissingers of this world.

But incredibly, going against the spirit of the time, the conservative prime minister of the UK, Macmillan, was wise enough to sense the gravity of the moment and instead called for a change of course. But denialists still remain everywhere, busily pushing in an anti-clockwise direction, intent on restoring the “good old days”.

That which they pronounced unthinkable has happened. Whoever thought there would be a black president in the US in this century, merely 50 years after governor Wallace’s dire declaration; that South Africa would achieve democracy, however fragile, 50 years later in defiance of Kissinger’s cynicism; that the British Empire would not witness the gradual setting of the sun?

Read in Daily Maverick: “Barbara Masekela’s ‘Poli Poli’ resonates deeply for those of us who grew up under apartheid’s evil beginnings”

All of these events have happened in the lifetime of many. Despite these historic achievements much still remains to be done. Present conditions globally and locally are filled with unspeakable untidiness that requires more relentless effort to overcome.

Despite the negativity that has been deeply etched in the psyche of those who endured the psychological assaults of the oppressive centuries, there was an optimism that the nightmare would end. And through agency, to a large extent, it has. But a braver effort must be waged against the stubborn remnants that manifest themselves in negative and destructive ways.

The memory of the journey travelled from the dark days of racial oppression to the present constitutional democracy is necessary, if not imperative.

It reminds us of the capacity of humans to be cruel to fellow humans in the most egregious ways; allows us to take stock and plan for a more judicious future. DM