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Commemorating the ‘Trojan Horse’ massacre in Cape Town: the tension between vernacular and official expressions of memory

This paper engages with the process of memorialisation in post-apartheid South Africa, focusing on the case study of the so-called Trojan Horse Massacre memorial in Athlone, Cape Town. Unveiled in 2005, this memorial is the latest of a series of attempts to publicly memorialise the three young victims of a local ambush attack organised by the South African security forces in August 1985. The paper investigates how these memorials as cultural expressions manifest the intersection of the official or monumental and the vernacular or popular, which, according to John Bodnar, always characterises public memory. It is argued that the increasing institutionalisation of the memory of this event, especially during the post-apartheid period, has resulted in an increasing shift away from the vernacular and toward the official – a development that is paralleled in many other commemorative initiatives in post-apartheid South Africa. This shift is accompanied, and perhaps defined, by the increasingly significant role accorded to visual images in the design of the memorial marker. Different products of visual representation, both fictional and documentary, are investigated for their suitability as source imagery for the public memorial. The use of visual images in public memorials is meant to allow diverse audiences to relate to the memory marker, but such visual representation arguably also solidifies hegemonic narratives and may invalidate alternative memories.