Abstract:
Commemoration of the Wars of Resistance in South Africa generally and the subsequent
monuments in honour of Warrior Kings in Limpopo Province particularly raised recognition
of African traditional leadership beyond the status it had previously enjoyed in South African
historical memory. The figure of the king also provided a model of post struggle leadership.
He represented the political posture, the collective responsibilities, and the ideals of personal
appearance prescribed by the society that honoured him, including its vision of ethnicity. The
king was particularly emblematic of ideas about masculinity in the wake of a war and amid
the social upheavals that followed it. Limpopo‘s commemorative Wars of Resistance
monument represents the physical points of collective remembrance and stand in South
Africa‘s public spaces as a permanent reminder of the wars of resistance.
The creation of a collective memory is very important to the cohesion of the people of
Limpopo Province. The population of the province consists of several ethnic groups
distinguished by culture, language and race. Thus, the decision by the Limpopo Provincial
Government to launch the ‗Wars of Resistance against Colonialism and Imperialism‘ theme
was meant not only to acknowledge the contribution of the selected kings that are being
honoured, but also to bring about an element of cohesion and shared past out of the people of
Limpopo.
Indeed every society, whatever its ideological climate requires a sense of continuity with the
past and its enduring memories maintain this continuity. Stable memories strengthen
society‘s ―temporal integration‖ by creating links between the living and the dead and
promoting consensus over time. This consensus is resilient because memories create the
grounds for their own perpetuation. Memories are not credible unless they conform to an
existing structure of assumptions about the past—an ―available past‖ that people accept as
given and that possesses a self-sustaining inertia. Thus a true community is a ―community of
memory,‖ one whose past is retained by retelling the same ―cognitive narrative,‖ by recalling
the people who have always embodied and exemplified its moral values and in this case those
are the warrior kings of the Limpopo Province.
