Notes for a Guide to the Ossuary Louise Green and Noe ¨ leen Murray 1 Stellenbosch University and University of the Western Cape This essay considers the awkward ‘life of the corpse’ outside of the official spaces of the designated cemetery or burial ground in post-apartheid South Africa. We reflect on a new memorial building in Cape Town, an Ossuary named the New Prestwich Memorial. The memorial was built following a city-wide dispute over the ‘accidental discovery’ of the bones of thousands of people who were buried in Prestwich Street, close to Cape Town’s harbour, but whose presence had been forgotten and concealed by colonial urban development. This essay considers the New Prestwich Memorial Building as an object of public culture. It emerges out of our own deliberate attempt to engage with the Ossuary as an object in history – incomplete, troubling and under construction. Mindful of the debates and texts written about the dispute circu- lating in Cape Town, we visited both the site of the ‘discovery’ of the bones in Prestwich Street and the Ossuary. We noted the elements in the visual landscape that alerted us to the work being done by this combination of material substances and design. Our essay is organised around six key terms or phrases that occur in the exhibition text, which guide the visitor’s interpretation of the space. These words and phrases appeared to us to mark moments of intense symbolisation, signifiers in which the ideological work of the architect and the authors of the exhibition became most visible. The terms are: Gateway; Engraved Palimpsest; Mirrors; Visitors’ Book; Concrete, Brick, Stone; and Closed. Key words: public culture, burial, memorialisation, architecture, heritage, African cities, Ossuary History records the lives of populations – their migrations, their actions, their work and the arrangement and transformations of their social configuration. What happens after life has ended has traditionally been the domain of religion. History, at its most literal, ends with death, perhaps more accurately, at the moment of death a split occurs between the symbolic life (especially of public figures that might continue indefinitely) and the actual death, the corpse, the material trace. At the point of death, the body, such a significant bearer of meaning in life, undergoes a curious transformation. It makes a sudden and star- tling transformation from animate being to inanimate object. Yet it is an inanimate object to which residues of meaning adhere. In the dead body, organic life takes over, yet because of these residues of meaning it cannot be abandoned entirely to nature and the process of decay. Burial practices try to mediate this complex life of the no longer animate body through finding a space for the dead in the world of the living. Although practices vary widely, the work of the burial is to designate formally both a literal space, which might be the ground of a cemetery ISSN 0002-0184 print/ISSN 1469-2872 online/09/030370 – 17 # 2009 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd on behalf of the University of Witwatersrand DOI: 10.1080/00020180903381230 African Studies, 68, 3, December 2009