a successful model of cooperation and collaboration, working with memory sites associated with social and political trauma and violence. Now a global network with around 200 members in 50 countries, the coalition prides itself on an activist agenda which involves understanding the lessons of the past, working “not only to preserve memories of what happened before, but also to understand the context in which these events occurred and apply these lessons to today’s struggles for human rights and social justice.”14 Crucially, the coalition also recognizes that, “without safe spaces to remember and preserve these memories, the stories of elderly survivors of atrocity can vanish when they pass away; societies that have overcome conflicts may never seek justice for fear of re-opening old wounds; and the families of the disappeared may never find answers.”15 One of the consistent strategies mobilized by member sites is the conscripting of local survivors as guardians and curators. Visitor experience is thus shaped by the memories of individuals who are intimately connected with the events commemorated at the site and this alone has a huge impact on the motivation for social action.
Museum work with difficult histories presents distinctive challenges and opportunities. It can be difficult to avoid engaging in an unfortunate meritocracy of trauma, especially where different sites of conscience, and the constituencies and legacies associated with them, may be competing for dwindling funds accompanied by a desire for basic human rights. Yet museums have played important roles in bringing to the fore human rights issues, land claims, and other injustices and enabling dialogue to take place in the face of official amnesia. For example, Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen, the complex and intelligent exhibition held in 1996 at the South African National Gallery (SANG), was criticized by some for casting a paternalistic eye on Khoi San culture and history. However, one of the results of the criticism was that it prompted SANG to hold an unprecedented public forum where Griqua and Khoi San rights organizations could air their views on how Miscast had represented their past, and voice the implications for their current status in the then relatively newly democratic South Africa. The Miscast controversy proved to be the trigger that provided a platform for Indigenous rights organizations to restate their land claims. This trajectory from exhibition, via controversy, to political action has been repeated in many other places, further suggesting the value of the museum as a forum where painful issues can be productively opened up as a preliminary step toward judicial and political action.16 In these contexts museums can serve as rehearsal halls and safe places for debates which might prove dangerously divisive outside their doors.17 Similarly, as Bruno Latour (2005) has urged, such controversies can usefully reveal what he calls “failures of translation” – the broken connections that link human actors, objects, technologies of representation, and institutions, so that productively functioning systems can be “reassembled.”18
To follow violent upheavals with massive state and private investment in public commemoration projects is nothing new. Europe is still living with the legacy of both world wars in the form of monuments and war memorials, erected largely through public subscription. The preference continues for memorializing events of national significance, including those with violent and controversial histories, with public statues that honor individuals identified as heroes. Most recently in Kenya, following one of the worst bouts of postelection violence in that country’s history, a government task force was convened in 2007 to solicit from community forums the names and deeds of “heroes” and “heroines.” Ostensibly designed to represent every part of the country, and, more specifically, each of Kenya’s 42 ethnic groups, the task force was initiated to forge a united Kenya and a new public vision of Kenya’s national story in the wake of the violence, through state-sponsored commissions of public statues of historical political leaders (Coombes 2011). The timing of this gesture proved to be opportunistic for the main contenders of the next general election and not without controversy. The task force itself, and the process it began, were shown to be more of a hindrance than a help in the cause of national unity. Because it encouraged a competitive jockeying for position between different ethnic groups who wanted their own hero(ine) to be acknowledged by the state, it reinforced rather than diminished the ethnic particularism that had contributed to the postelection violence in the first place.
All too often, conventional memorials quickly become relegated to the periphery of our sight lines, derelict and forgotten spaces or simply made invisible through the banalization that comes with familiarity. While monuments provide important focal points for public gatherings when they are first unveiled, or later as sites for poignant rituals of remembrance on key anniversaries, the neglect that inevitably follows weakens their ability to inspire an active agenda for social change.
In the Kenyan case it was left to two temporary exhibitions of photographs of the postelection violence to generate public awareness of the extent of the atrocities: Kenya Burning, funded by the Ford Foundation, and Heal the Nation, a street exhibition of Boniface Mwangi’s photos of the postelection events accompanied by a 30 minute documentary (Muhoma and Nyairo 2011; see also www.pichamtaani.org). The Go-Down Arts Centre which curated Kenya Burning, and Mwangi’s Picha Mtaani youth initiative, which organized Heal the Nation, realized that a street exhibition that could circulate the photographs to the flashpoints of the violence would be a far more effective way of bringing home the implications of the killing spree to a broad multiethnic public than keeping the photographic evidence within the confines of an exhibition venue in Nairobi. This exhibition strategy proved so powerful that a recovery tent and a therapist were needed to deal with the fallout from the shocking images. Many of the audience had been protected from directly witnessing events, and for them the photographs provided the first real sense of the extent of the brutality enacted on Kenyans by Kenyans. That this cathartic role should be supplied by two temporary exhibitions is telling. The flexibility of the format has often succeeded where the more static permanent displays in museums have failed, not least because it is easier to take risks with a temporary exhibition than a permanent gallery, the funding for which often necessitates a more prosaic approach to history.
Nonetheless, in contrast to a conventional memorial’s erratic relevance and the advantages of the temporary exhibition, the pedagogic function of the conventional museum has also seen a dramatic rise in recent years. In almost every case where there have been gross human rights abuses, there is now a museum erected to honor the victims. In many of the histories represented the blame is less easily apportioned than, for example, in Holocaust museums, and this ambiguity complicates the process of remembrance. Where such compromises are acknowledged, however, the museum can become a site for healing and reconciliation. Smaller local or community museums have often been more successful in pursuing projects of reconciliation because they can be more responsive to the direct needs of those affected by legacies of violence. They are also freer of some of the bureaucratic obligations affecting large national institutions called on to accommodate broader constituencies, which can make it difficult for them to pay attention to the specific requirements and protocols that make reconciliation effective. On the one hand, the anonymity of a bigger institution can be helpful in providing a “neutral” territory for the disclosure of grievances; on the other hand, the associations of these museums with state sponsorship can dissuade the victims of violence from working with them.
In contrast, local and community museums in postconflict zones are adept at applying local knowledge of the ways retribution and vigilantism operate in their areas and are attentive to local power structures that could either exacerbate the violence or, conversely, contribute to its alleviation. In Kenya, Dr. Sultan Somjee, then an ethnographer at the national museum, worked with grassroots organizations to promote local forms of conflict resolution using elders’ knowledge of how material culture has historically been used to broker peace. The community peace museums he helped to establish all over Kenya were instrumental in initiating dialogue between ethnic communities whose historic antagonism to each other dates back to the colonial period, when the British and their Kenyan allies forced the removal and relocation of communities for strategic and economic benefit. Community museums are often controlled by those directly affected by the traumatic events that have necessitated reconciliation and redress: this is a critical factor in enabling successful resolution. In the case of the Lari
