Living sculptures that stand for history's truths

This book details the pitfalls of commemorative practice in South Africa. Collective memory is embedded in statues, monuments, memorials, architecture and even art. How do these platforms remember the past and unify the image of a "New South Africa"? In the practice of nation-building some histories become fabricated and indeed erasure becomes a part of collective memory. What stays present is the markers of the landscape is the presence of white domination in the South Africa's "landscape of remembrance."

With the ushering in of a new democracy, the South African landscape was posed with a new problem: How do we transform the heritage sector in an inclusive way that reflects the demographics of the country? The anti-apartheid government relied heavily on monuments, statues and memorials that create a sense of nation-building. However, not everyone could identify with such symbols of representation.

Animist thought, as Harvey points out, acknowledges the spiritual agency that layers a material and abstract reality of being and space. Reconsidering concepts such as animism becomes a process of drawing out alternative narratives in postcolonial scholarship that have been erased in history-making. Harvey further reinforces that new Animism names worldviews and lifeways in which people seek to know how they might respectfully and properly engage with other persons.

One of the believed eight soapstone Zimbabwean Birds that was taken from Great Zimbabwe in the late 1800s is still kept in Cecil John Rhodes Groote Schuur Estate in Cape Town. There has been a call to return the remaining bird to Great Zimbabwe.