After the Spectacle: The Fog of Art and the Making of History Beyond the Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary

The 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival marked a decisive moment in the visual construction of White settler history in South Africa. Organised at a time of deep division within White settler society, the Festival mobilised an unprecedented programme of monuments, pageantry and performance to render a certain version of History as picture and as a material fact. This article examines the visual regime of the Tercentenary and its afterlife, focusing on how aesthetic overproduction and the repetition of a limited set of images normalised a racialised settler ideology of belonging beyond the bounds of the Festival itself. Rather than treating the Festival solely as a national spectacle, it traces how its imagery circulated, persisted and became banal through familiarity, shaping popular understandings of South African origins and belonging in the decades that followed. It argues that the Festival’s power lay not simply in the production of historical meaning, but in the process of aesthetic overproduction and visual banalisation, through which settler history and belonging became ordinary, repeatable and seemingly self-evident.