The Importance Of Monuments

Monuments are a way of documenting, honouring and commemorating events as well as individuals. Monuments are physical objects that take on varied forms; that is, statues, plaques, columns, stones, street signs, buildings or even rooms in a public space. In general, monuments are usually erected by the state, local communities or groups associated with the individuals being remembered. Monuments are commonly erected after wars to pay tribute to the heroes and heroines who either fell or survived the war. The first impression of a monument’s power pertains to its size, design and location, but a monument is less defined by the way it looks like than by what it represents or how people utilise it. A monument express the power and the sense of the society that gives it meaning. For instance, in Kampala, a monolith stone that stands in

“There is nothing in the world as invisible as a monument”; this quote suggests that the monument tends to either be ignored or it is not in adequate proximity to be experienced by the ordinary people to whom it is intended, and this is due to a number of reasons. First, there is limited literature on the monument to describe its symbolism. Therefore, to the observers it is viewed as a bunch of statues, which is insulting to the artists and the government that commissioned it. This is more felt in Uganda where the reading culture is poor, later on reading about art. Secondly, the monument is sometimes far from the ordinary people it was intended for, located in a space that is out-of-bounds to the ordinary people as noted above with The Journey. People do not get the opportunity to experience and interact with the monument, therefore people do not have any attachment to, as well as a sense of belonging with the monument; they actually have no reason to remember or even get to know about the monument thus not preserving