This paper examines the decoding of the memory of apartheid and post apartheid years of South Africa’s recent history. And it contextualizes how the struggle influenced the visual arts. Also analyzed are the history of the Constitution and Constitutional Court of South Africa. It interrogates the formation of the Constitutional Court art collection. by Justices Albie Sachs and Yvonne Mokgoro for the yet-to-be-constructed Constitutional Court building in Johannesburg. Many donated artworks are responsive both to the anti-apartheid struggles and also to the new democracy. The essay also examines the underlying politic that now hangs in the Constitutional Court building. Select works, that function as signifiers of the new Constitution, are examined. I draw on interviews with South African artists, Court Justices and curators to investigate the role of memory, the archeology of the site, and the significance of the collection to the artists, the Justices, and citizens of South Africans twenty years post apartheid.

This dissertation analyzes the memorialization of the South African Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) with specific attention to the construction of identity, trauma, and generational memory of the war in visual culture. This topic is approached through close analysis of visual representations of the war including especially more than six hundred stereoscopic photographs from the Underwood and Underwood collection dating from the turn of the century. These little studied photographs were key technologies in the shaping of modern South Africa’s apartheid racial system. Underwood and Underwood’s boxed sets of stereoviews of Africa, including images of the South African War, represented the single most significant visual encounter with Africa for Westerners in this period, shaping public perceptions. In the circulation of visual representations of the war, including in performed re-enactment, we observe the origins of U.S. sympathy for the Boer cause. The stereoscopes were used to develop a large-scale reenactment of the war at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Recently defeated Boer Generals traveled to the United States to participate as reenactors. The performances at the fair are a tableau vivant of the Underwood and Underwood stereoviews. As a work of public history, through tracing the recirculation of the photographs and other visual representations of the war, including in the reshaping of the War Museum of the Boer Republics, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, this study observes the continuing power of the war and its trauma in collective, public memory and the role of these images in constructing new racial discourses and identities.

This paper will cover the new trends in African journalism caused by the latest wave in Information Communications Technologies. The paper will also explore the literature that has focused on African media.