Beyond Trauma: New Perspectives on the Politics of Memory in East and Southern Africa

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Notes

The body of literature on the TRC is enormous; for a survey, see Verdoolaege 2006.

Not only writers and literary critics became enthralled with the notion of narrative. Anthropologist Steven Robins (1998), for instance, contributed a chapter to Negotiating the Past, in which he reflected, in an autobiographical voice, on memory, nationalism, and narratives of the body (emphasis added).

This recent publication thus takes up a concern that was raised before by, among others, Fiona Ross (2003), namely how speech at the TRC was shaped by powerful conventions of gender and age. Antjie Krog and her co-authors here add an emphasis on ethnicity and the rural-urban divide.

Some of the TRC's critics pointed out that the Commission focused on the human rights violations that were committed by the apartheid state's ‘security’ forces but omitted the everyday violence of life under apartheid. They argued, thus, that the TRC process did not contribute much to the documentation of the southern African region's contemporary history (see, for example, Bundy 2000). Other commentators have drawn attention to the fact that the TRC's public hearings tended to (de facto) exclude certain sections of the population on political or social grounds. Fiona Ross (2003), for instance, found that many young women anti-apartheid activists of the 1980s were reluctant to bear witness at the Commission's hearings because of the perception that the TRC would present them as victims, rather than as active agents of change.

Pat Caplan (2007) has published brief observations of some Rwandan genocide memorial sites; a few more detailed relevant contributions have been published in languages other than English (for example, Brandstetter 2005; Kanimba 2005; Rudacogora 2005; Vidal 2001).

As Ranger points out with a good deal of self-reflection, much of this nationalist historiography of Zimbabwe was his own earlier work.

The consideration of South African residents of different nationalities has become particularly urgent with the recurrent xenophobic attacks.

Thus far, only a few relevant published academic articles are accessible for an English readership, for example, Conway 2003; Hunter 2008a; Kössler 2007; McConnell 2000. Justine Hunter's doctoral study has been published in German (Hunter 2008b), while more recent dissertations are still unpublished (for example, Williams 2009).

See, for example, Gibson (2010) on the silences surrounding the experiences of former white conscripts in the apartheid army.