Madiba statue set to grace Parade?

The statues of Madiba at the entrance to the Drakenstein Correctional Centre near Paarl, at the Union Buildings in Pretoria and on Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton.

The statues of Madiba at the entrance to the Drakenstein Correctional Centre near Paarl, at the Union Buildings in Pretoria and on Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton.

Published Apr 14, 2016

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Cape Town - The Cape Town city council will consider a proposal to erect a statue of Nelson Mandela on the Grand Parade.

The council’s naming committee is forging ahead with plans to erect another statue of the former president in Cape Town, and has resolved to form a project team to speed up the process.

The proposal for a Madiba statue in the Company’s Garden has been in the offing since 2013.

On Wednesday, the DA’s Xoliswa Pakela-Mapasa proposed that the committee also consider the Grand Parade as an alternative site, given its location across from the City Hall where Madiba made his iconic speech after his release from prison in 1990.

Last year, mayor Patricia de Lille unveiled a bust of Madiba at City Hall as part of Freedom Day celebrations.

On Wednesday, the committee agreed that the city’s heritage manager establish a team of officials to propose a suitable location.

They should also determine the costs associated with designing the sculpture and initiate a public process to suggest artists for the job.

The committee is due to receive feedback from the heritage manager, Lorraine Gerrans, at its meeting next month about the composition of the task team and how often it would report back to the committee.

The chairman of the naming committee, Brett Herron, said he hoped with the formation of a city task team, the proposal would gain momentum so costs and design work could be finalised in the next budget year.

The council had originally wanted to collaborate with Parliament on a statue in the Company’s Garden, But Herron said this plan had not come to much and, in 2014, Parliament unveiled a bust of Madiba in front of the National Assembly building.

In February, Herron told the committee that a group of unnamed philanthropists had offered to drive the project and possibly even source funding for a Madiba statue.

Besides the bust at Parliament, there is already a statue of Mandela on Nobel Square at the V&A Waterfront.

The two-metre tall bronze statue, which appears alongside FW de Klerk, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and Chief Albert Luthuli, was unveiled on Reconciliation Day in 2005. The statues were designed by Claudette Schreuders.

A much larger three-metre high statue of Mandela is at the entrance to the Drakenstein Correctional Centre near Paarl, where Mandela spent the last years of his incarceration. It was commissioned by Struggle stalwart Tokyo Sexwale from Cape Town sculptor Jean Doyle.

South Africa’s most iconic statues of Madiba are, however, in Pretoria and Joburg. In 2013, an R8 million statue of Madiba was unveiled at the Union Buildings, only 10 days after his death. The nine-metre high, 3.5 ton bronze sculpture is the tallest of the figurative statues of Mandela in South Africa. It was created by local sculptors André Prinsloo and Ruhan Janse van Vuuren.

In 2004, Sandton Square’s renaming to Nelson Mandela Square was accompanied by the unveiling of a six-metre high statue of Madiba that weighs 2.5 tons, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the first democratic elections. It was sculpted by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane.

The tallest Madiba memorial, however, is Marco Cianfanelli’s 6.5m-9.5m steel construction in Howick, KwaZulu-Natal.

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