Cape Town: The Community, Arts and Culture Development Department of the City of Cape Town completed the restoration of the Race Classification Board Memorial outside the High Court Annex building with the original artist – Dr. Roderick Sauls.
Reportedly, the memorial was originally installed in 2007 as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Project. The two benches mimic apartheid-era public benches inscribed ‘Whites Only’ and ‘Non-Whites Only’ but also include text from the notorious Population Registration Act which defined the characteristic of different racial groups, often in arbitrary and humiliating ways.
Member of the Mayoral Committee for Community Services and Health – Councillor Francine Higham said that by confronting this difficult history, they created opportunities for reflection, understanding and collective growth. The memorials served as tangible reminders of the past, facilitating remembrance, healing, and reconciliation. The memorial offers a space for fostering a shared understanding of the past and promoting national identity and unity.
The Artist – Dr. Roderick Sauls also stated his version and said that they had this and other laws which segregated society. He felt that art would play a meaningful role in engaging with people, communicating, and bringing people together. One can imagine what happened inside this building in the late 50s, when people were reclassified.
For Dr. Sauls, they did not understand at that particular time what the system meant and what the system did to them and what it did to human spirituality. It’s taking him back 20 years. It is about memory; it is a lot about memory and bringing those memories back.
Notably, the restoration projects planned for the financial year include the restoration of the Queen Victoria Memorial Fountain, the colonial Mutual Clock Tower, the Langa Memorial, the Knot sculpture and the replacement of various missing memorial plaques.
The restoration projects got completed during the financial year which are:
- Sea Point Geological Memorial – a new ceramic interpretive signage
- Jan Smuts Statue – replacement plaque
- Observatory WW1 Memorial – restoration and recreation of stolen bronze plaques
- Trojan Horse Memorial Phase-1 – general restoration and recreation of three stolen or damaged plaques
- Cape Town Memorial to the Enslaved – general repairs to the granite blocks and repairs to one smashed granite block
- Gugulethu Seven Memorial – general restoration, replace missing or damaged plaques