This online artwork offers voice for public memory, witness, and queer love. It draws together histories that matter which appear disparate, but are connected and equally important. Those of Sarah Baartman and Uyinene Mrwetyana in the Cape, an ant in KwaZulu-Natal, the Alp mountains and sky in Europe – and Two Boy Ogres with an Old River Bird, everywhere.  

It is a story of queer and feminist trust, writing for us that neither is free without the other, each of us is bound to each other. It shows the only footage of the de-lettering of Jameson/Sarah Baartman/Uyinene Memorial Hall at the University of Cape Town, submitting it for public memory, yet issued with a charge: for you to hear, and hold, the power of queer love. I wrote this story of Two Boy Ogres and an Old Bird, which holds the voice of these histories, and futures, together. It is an offering to keep coming back to – this story of queer and feminist politics – as we work to understanding endings of violence, and the insistent continued turns to beauty, freedom and love. It is perhaps Gayatri Spivak’s ‘double bind’, told in a different way…

On the 31st of August and 1st of September 2019, the University of Cape Town removed the letters of JAMESON MEMORIAL HALL from the newly coined Sarah Baartman Hall. They did this in secret, in private, when most students where away from campus during the spring week vacation. They did this actively excluding the public from participating in this historic moment, when the world could bear witness to the fall of Jameson – a direct result of the Rhodes Must Fall movement. They did this despite my and others’ efforts to ensure that they include the many publics in the region – the university community – in a moment that is about their own histories and futures. The publics have a right to participate in their own History. There were no official cameras or ceremonies to document this moment, or even record for the archive – the unarchived don’t get to be burned up when a relentlessly fought-over mountain with its ancient fires merely breathes. It was a secret privilege afforded to the reigning patriarch’s prince – Jameson of Rhodesian of Imperial commands – that he be allowed to crumble in private, that his broken letters and dismantled body not be witnessed by the victorious who have earned this right, when he is to be removed, when he ought to bear the responsibility of accepting humiliation, to see their legacy fall.

In the days preceding this de-lettering of Sarah Baartman – officiated only in the university’s rolled-out discourse, but with no ceremonies to heal her memories, to deexhibition-ize and demuseum-ize her history – Uyinene Mrwetyana was desperately missing. On the 2nd of September, the Monday when students returned for their final term, the news that she was murdered had cut the morning and day, and would cut the weeks that followed – the original sin had repeated itself in the contemporary, she was raped before she was murdered. She was not the only one. She was not the only one. It cut the students and communities such that these days saw the greatest gatherings on the plaza steps since the Fallist seas of people who stood and protested for Rhodes and Fees to Fall, in all their many meanings. The week saw a pop-up Assembly where Gender-Based Violence embodied trauma, protest, podiums, marches, and one of the biggest protest-gatherings at the Cape Town Parliament.

But these moments of the de-lettering of Sarah Baartman’s memory, spirit and symbolic body and the total and rippling destruction upon Uyinene Mrwetyana, were not connected publicly, and the people were disallowed to fully grieve, to connect the hundreds of years that thread the social reproduction of rape and murder upon women, queers, childs, and other targeted peoples. The scratchy ugly defiled absence where JAMESON MEMORIAL HALL could still be read – was made to be rapidly covered up in brown paint, but his traces remained. They still remain now, under the newly printed letters of SARAH BAARTMAN HALL. To call it a palimpsest is to too generous. It is more like a fowl’s scratch in the dirt, with new names chained to an old ghostly body, still, without ceremony. Her name too, was erected in secret, made to parade one Monday morning for anyone who wouldn’t care.

As a filmmaker and student who came upon this moment, and an activist bound to this moment, I documented, I archived, I caught UCT ‘blood-handed’ at its attempt to erase the humiliating Fall of Jameson, from the public record, memory, and archive. See my Instagram post from that day here on my account “@vikram.ker”. 

This work then draws on my photographic and video archive – the only film footage to timelapse the de-lettering of Sarah Baartman Hall. I was also there when the Uyinene Mrwetyana protests of mourning took the campus from the 2 September, coming out an African Studies class I taught on public memory. I flew over Saartjie’s mountains. I witnessed an ant witnessing me. Here, I use my skills as filmmaker to create an online experience that seeks to re/create a ceremony to honour these histories that matter, and interrupt the gaps of silence that animate public memory and archive.