March 2005
Sites of Memory: From ‘Oaktown’ to Cape Town
by Tim Kingston
Middle Harbor Shoreline Park is a thin green crescent nestled in the crook of the Port of Oakland’s busy Hanjin and Ben E. Nutter container terminals at the end of Seventh Street in West Oakland. There is a dissonant ambiance to the bright new park — a sense of abandonment and bustle, forgetfulness and remembrance.
The Alameda buoy echoes forlornly, competing with the clang and crash of swiftly loading container ships barely a stone’s throw from the park boundary. Southwest Airlines 727s rumble low overhead, their roar muted, no louder than the cries of seagulls and cormorants on the water or the rapid beeps of the ILWU-driven container trucks racing around the docks. In the distance, the Bay Bridge insect-walks across the water as San Francisco gleams mistily, like the City of Oz it aspires to be.
The park is a place of unrecognized dreams and buried memories where I wander, mind drifting, until I stumble across two solid bronze plaques. One commemorates environmental and community activist Chappel Roland Hayes, who, among other achievements, “convinced Caltrans to reroute the new Cypress freeway away from West Oakland neighborhoods.” After years of organizing, Hayes finally persuaded Caltrans and the Port of Oakland to consider the employment and environmental needs of West Oakland communities.
The other plaque is dedicated to John “Alex” Alexander, a former Naval Supply Center Oakland (NSCO) employee recognized for “tireless work on behalf of the community.” The NSCO building was named after Alexander for his 50 years of West Oakland community service, and the park carries on the tradition.
I rarely see any community activists, especially African Americans — so honored in the United States. These plaques inspired me to compare them with other such commemorations in South Africa, a nation I recently visited. There, I found anti- apartheid activists at the center of both public and private memory, whereas these unassuming plaques seem almost hidden in their urban park setting.
By contrast, in South Africa, there is omnipresent pride in the activism that doomed apartheid. In Cape Town, a huge mural opposite the national Parliament building, celebrates the first day of democratic elections. Official art exhibits celebrate a decade of democracy. At the ferry building tourists gather for trips to Robben Island (site of Nelson Mandela’s 27-year-long imprisonment). there’s a museum dedicated to the ephemera of activism: posters, photographs, yellowing leaflets and activist reports. All are officially celebrated, whereas in the United States such community activism is, at best, an alternative story rather than the central narrative.
In Cape Town’s District 6 Museum (which celebrates a neighborhood whose residents were forcibly relocated by the apartheid regime), there is a detailed timeline of resistance to their eviction and relocation. A fascinating aspect of the chronology is its inclusion of all political groups: Trotskyites, Communists, Stalinists, African Nationalists and the myriad others who fought the destruction of their homes. The museum assumes visitors are politically sophisticated enough to distinguish among these factions. In the US, the names of such groups never appear in public spaces.
But it is not the official memorials in South Africa that pack the greatest emotional wallop. On Robben Island, the poignancy of an unassuming pile of multi-hued stones is, at first, hidden. When Mandela returned to Robben Island years after being released, he visited the quarry where he spent decades breaking rocks. This time, he picked up a stone and dropped it by the entrance. And one by one, hundreds of other political prisoners present that day dropped stones on the same spot. A simple pile of rocks became a heartbreaking testament to survival and struggle.
Dozens of similar sites dot South Africa, be they a spray of graffiti, a rag doll or no clear memorial at all — just an oral history of massacre, a demonstration or prison cell burned in the memories of the participants and those to whom the story is told. For South Africans, the mental memorials are of people winning after years of setbacks, terror and repression.
The activists remembered by the plaques at Middle Harbor Shoreline Park may have a less overtly dramatic story than their South African counterparts, but that does not lessen their contribution. Nor does it change the fact that they are the ones who do history’s heavy lifting, not the “great men” who always seem to get the granite statues. To me, the plaques occupy a place halfway between the ephemeral memorials of South Africa and the larger more permanent markers like the District 6 Museum or official murals.
The plaques are modest, yet bronze and permanent. There is no museum for the struggles of West Oakland. But instead of being distressed by the modesty of the bronze plaques, I feel that perhaps Hayes and Alexander are being honored, with dignity, in the best South African tradition—that is, in the immediate neighborhood where they fought for their community.
Tim Kingston is an Oakland-based freelance writer.
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