Thank you very much, Chair. This question is also from hon Mncube. Statues or monuments in our public life depict the history of the country. Therefore, we have no intention to remove all of them, because they are part of our history, as I have said. I know that the history of South Africa is good and bad. It's good and bad in the sense that we come from a divided past. There will be those who will be offended by particular statues, and so on.
Our approach is that if a statue has to be removed, there has to be a due process of consultation in that particular institution or in the community in regard to the fact that the statue needs to be removed or replaced. Once due process has taken place, we will then consider the matter. This is the same approach that we use for geographic names in various communities. Communities themselves must be able to consider these changes.
In many respects communities are doing that. For instance, yesterday I was in Gugulethu. I've been in Gugulethu many times, but I didn't know what the meaning of NY1 or NY2 was. When I was there, I asked them what the meaning of this was. They said that it meant "Native Yard". The community has now taken a decision that they want to change the names in Gugulethu. The matter is serving before the council of Cape Town. I'm told that there is unanimous support for this process.
Really, it's the communities that now have an opportunity to deal with this. If the community feels that a statue that is in their area or their institution does not really reflect their culture or their interests, they may embark on a due process to request that it be removed. What we are doing as Arts and Culture now is to build new museums and new monuments so that we can have a balanced history, because many of the monuments that were created during the apartheid years reflected mainly apartheid history. Therefore, we need to create that balance.
Yes, in certain instances we will consider replacing these, but we don't want just to have an all-out programme to remove all the statues from the past in our public spaces. Thank you very much.