Gear yourself up for a re-run of the Anglo-Boer War this weekend when conceptual artist Kendell Geers attempts a Solo occupation of Fort Klapperkop outside Pretoria.

Although the Pretoria City Council declared yesterday that the exhibition, more than a year in the making, was off, the artist intends going ahead with the two-day show dubbed Guilty. It constitutes the last guttering of the ill-fated 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, but it has already set the cultural temperature for the new year on boiling.

The reason, quite simply is that Geers has chosen a site held in reverence by Afrikanerdom.

Klapperkop is steeped in historical symbolism, being one of the quartet of forts Paul Kruger built to protect the capital of the infant Transvaal Republic in the years after the Jameson Raid of 1896 and before the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War in October 1899.

It is no accident that, 90-odd years after that Second War of Independence, Willem Ratte seized Klapperkop's sister fortress, Schnskop, as an act of defiance and short lived declaration of independence. The forts that ring Pretoria are potent emblems of Afrikaner resistance then - and now.

But, while Geers' exhibition might seem calculated to inflame, or a publicity stunt as the centenary of the war approaches, that is a superficial and sensationalist view (Though one that certain Sunday newspapers will doubtless seize upon with mindless relish.)

Geers says the exhibition examines the historical import of the fort and its significance in this time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as well as being a critique of "the Beer War and most importantly Afrikaans culture in the new South Africa". That advancing of novel interpretations from outside the laager of Afrikaans culture is what has set ablaze the letters pages of conservative newspapers around the country

Geers has provoked cultural xenophobia that posits he has no right to be attempting such an analysis. All this, and those ardent scribes haven't yet been exposed to the melange of cultural pulses and impulses that Geers plans to appropriate tomorrow to make up his show Gears will "present" the following from lOam tomorrow: performances and lectures; a church service; the firing of a G1 cannon from the fort's memorial to soldiers killed in action; traditional Afrikaans folk dancing (sakki~saakie included; the raising and lowering of, first, the Vierkleur and then the Union Jack and, to conclude, the firing at midnight of an Armstrong cannon.

But it is what is scheduled for the next day that has opponents of Guilty even more incensed. Kruger opened Klapperkop on January 18 1898,100 years ago this Sunday. On the selfsame day at noon, Geers plans to "occupy" it alone and "close it in the name of art". That is creating an art work in the tradition of Geers' emptying a room at the Johannesburg Art Gallery of everything, as a comment on homelessness in the surrounding area.

But it is only observation of Geers' Klapperkop occupation that will determine whether he means to isolate himself or to exclude the reactionary from a revisited, revised and by then thoroughly reclaimed site. One thing is certain: Klapperkop will never be the same.

Nor will our view of the Boer war. As its centenary approaches, knowledge and interpretations of the war grow in breadth, depth and sophistication. The way the nomenclature has changed is a telling indicator of evolution in our understanding of what really happened.'

I have deliberately used all the names for the war; beginning with Anglo-Boer, moving through Boer, Second War of Independence and now on to the latest, the South African War 1899-1902.

Under that non-nationalist and neutral name it becomes possible to begin including the thousands of missing combatants of the conflict, those ghost warriors who have been omitted deliberately from most accounts of the war.

They include black and coloured soldiers who fought on both sides, some of whom rode with commandos or were part of the British cavalry's flying columns. They number among them also Boers who scouted for and fought on the side of the British.
Until recently they have all been phantoms, excluded both from the deeply personal, fiercely patriotic accounts of the time and the jaundiced or romanticised histories that followed. The reason for this historical lacuna - a genteel way of saying apartheid history - is not hard to find.

One has only to recall, for example, Baden-Powell's crimes against humanity in starving to death black inhabitants of the then Mafeking while it was besieged by the Boers, to be reminded at once of the social, economic and power realities of the day.

The revisionism that the war is undergoing is healing, for it restores identity and humanity to hitherto faceless thousands, victims of a conflict that affected all South Africans.

In a way it is a mini-TRC, effected by historians and others picking over those lost lives.

In that spirit, it is not fanciful to suggest that Geers' exhibition, aside from its contemporary resonances and consequences, will contribute to that reclamation of history as well. And that is why culture counts.