Special Report Transcript Episode 20, Section 3, Time 17:36

I think monuments can be live monuments, they can be dead monuments. And a dead monument is something that’s got no vitality and meaning in itself, it’s just a big pile of stones. And I think of all the ceremonies you find in Europe and other countries where there had been many dead, they’re commemorated. They have no meaning really for the people, they just block the streets. They’re quite useful as traffic signs – if you want to know where to go you turn left at that memorial and so on. The other kinds of monuments that have a living, breathing, very human quality, in their very nature, it can be a building itself - Robben Island and the prison on Robben Island is such a powerful monument; you don’t have to do anything, you just have to preserve it. Once when I was in Bloemfontein, it hadn’t been very long back, I had about two hours to spare and my host said ‘well what would you like to do?’ And just like an intuition welled up and I said ‘please take me to ‘Die Vrouemonument’ [The Women’s Monument]. The first thing I saw was a statue to ‘banningskap,’ that’s exile. I just came back from exile; I could identify. It was another section of society, another community, another historical period that had been sent into exile; but the experience of exile is the same. So I identified very, very strongly with this - what to me was a very authentic - memorial to real pain, real suffering of real individualized human beings. Some months later when I was in Pretoria I went to the Voortrekker Monument and my reaction was completely different. To me this was a monument to power, not to suffering, it lacked a human scale. The sense I had would be that this was a monument not to acknowledge what had happened in the past but to mobilize people for political purposes. Well that was my subjective reaction. But there’s a third kind of monument, and that is something specially constructed to enable people to mourn, to remember, where they can go. And perhaps the finest example of that is the Vietnam War Dead Monument in Washington. Instead of putting up a big, imposing lump of concrete with all sorts of dazzling features and so on, it’s a very simple sort of subway into which you walk and you just see the names of the thousands of American soldiers who died there. And it means that the families can come and they can trace the names of their relatives. It doesn’t impose a judgement; it doesn’t defend the sending of American troops to Vietnam; it simply recognizes the futility and stupidity of war and the terrible loss of life. And being so simple and being so intimate and so accessible to people, somehow it has a wonderfully soothing effect and yet there is a sense of nobility to it. It’s an example of what I feel a monument should be.

Notes: Judge Albie Sachs; Women’s Monument in Bloemfontein; Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria; Film of ‘Great Trek’ celebrations at Monument; Video of the Vietnam War Memorial, Washington

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