Race Classification Board Memorial restored: A step towards healing and reflection

The City’s Community, Arts and Culture Development Department has completed the restoration of the Race Classification Board Memorial outside the High Court Annex building with the original artist, Dr Roderick Sauls.

The two benches mimic apartheid-era public benches inscribed "Whites Only" and "Non-Whites Only" include text from the notorious Population Registration Act, which defined the characteristic of different racial groups, often in arbitrary and humiliating ways.

"By confronting this difficult history, we create opportunities for reflection, understanding and collective growth. Memorials serve 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," said Francine Higham, mayco member for Community Services and Health.

Further restoration projects 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.

Sauls said the project was a reminder of apartheid's brutality. 

"We had this and other laws which segregated society and I felt that art would play a meaningful role in engaging with people, to communicate, and to bring people together. One can imagine what happened inside this building in the late 50s, where people were reclassified. For me, we didn’t understand at that particular time what the system meant and what the system did to us and what it did to our human spirituality. It’s taking me back 20 years. It is about memory, it’s a lot about memory and bringing those memories back."

Restoration projects completed during the past financial year are the Sea Point Geological Memorial (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/damaged plaques), Cape Town Memorial to the Enslaved (general repairs to the granite blocks and repairs to one smashed granite block), and the Gugulethu Seven Memorial (general restoration, replace missing/damaged plaques).

Get your news on the go, click here to join the Cape Argus News WhatsApp channel.

Cape Argus