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Title: | From Langa Market Hall and Rhodes' Estate to the Grand Parade and the Foreshore: Contesting van Riebeeck's Cape Town |
Author: | Witz, Leslie |
Year: | 1998-1999 |
Periodical: | Kronos: Journal of Cape History |
Issue: | 25 |
Pages: | 187-206 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | South Africa The Cape |
Subjects: | commemorations urban history history History and Exploration Urbanization and Migration |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/41056433 |
Abstract: | The 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Festival, which aimed at promoting the idea and images of a racially designated settler nation as the inclusive South African nation, was opposed in a multiplicity of ways, including a massive campaign to boycott its proceedings. This paper takes these 'sites of struggle' as its point of embarkation. It starts with meetings that were organized to discuss the participation of local Africans in the festival in Cape Town's native location of Langa; it moves to the rowdy student meeting in Jameson Hall at the University of Cape Town. It then goes to the Grand Parade, where the largest meetings to oppose the festival were organized. Finally, it ends up on Cape Town's reclaimed foreshore where a group of Bushmen who were put on display refused to sing and dance for the large crowds that waited day after day to gaze upon them. The article shows that while the City of Cape Town was being remade into Van Riebeeck's city in 1952 the spaces of the festival did not effortlessly become the places designated for them in a history of settler nationalism. Ref. |