“Troubling” stories: thoughts on the making of meaning of shame/ful memory narratives in (post)apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT

Reflecting on narratives collected as part of the Apartheid Archive Project, a memory project of “ordinary” experiences of living under apartheid, this paper engages with stories that articulate white South Africans’ shame/ful relationships with Black female domestic workers. It is increasingly of concern that the dominant response to apartheid abuses are to consider them “in the past” in order to avoid discomforting reminders. Shame and its silencing effect, as feminist and other critical literature shows, is bound up with relations of power, legitimating privilege and subjugation. Yet, shame may also be deployed as narrative strategy to deal with subjective discomfort and guilt by those seeking to disentangle themselves from association with social privilege and its abuses. How do we respond to narratives that may have both effects? Drawing on contemporary critical pedagogies, such as the work of Zembylas that specifically engage with the affective turn, and guided by Probyn’s argument that shame is a powerful resource of social critique, this paper suggests productive possibilities of such narratives in contemporary South Africa. While acknowledging contestations, an argument is made for the value of stories of shame/shaming towards troubling the erasure of apartheid and its continuities in the present while also disrupting the denial of historical and current complicity with power and privilege.

KEYWORDS:

• Narratives
• post/apartheid
• memory
• shame
• domestic work
• critical pedagogies

Acknowledgments

Appreciation to Gill Straker, Michalinos Zembylas and Ross Truscott and the editors on this special edition for valuable engagements and guidance on this paper and to the anonymous reviewers for helpful and constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term “Black” is used here to refer to all those historically disenfranchised by apartheid; “white” to refer to those with political rights, and who were ideologically and materially advantaged by apartheid and continued global and local frameworks of white privilege.

2. In 2008, a group of four white male students at the University of Free State recorded a racist video in which they humiliated a group of Black mostly female student residence cleaners (see, for example, Soudien 2010; Mogotsi 2017). This event triggered a wave of concern about continued racist and other discriminatory and violent practices in South African universities and spurred intensified efforts to deal with intersectional racist practices in the university, resulting in the Transformation Report (DHET 2008, 2010).

3. In order to ensure anonymity the narratives which have been made publicly available and have been drawn on for research were numbered with the demographic details that were provided by the narrators in terms of apartheid racialised classifications, gender identification and age at the time of writing the narrative. Notably, the project was initiated in 2008 so many of the narratives drawn on here are now over 10 years old (www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory/U/collections&c=AG3275/R/9023).

4. My thanks to the anonymous reviewer for this articulation.

5. Appreciation to Lou-Marié Kruger for reminding me of this text and for her insightful writings on “writing white.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tamara Shefer

Tamara Shefer is professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of the Western Cape. She has researched primarily in areas related to intersectional gender and sexual justice, including research on young sexualities; masculinities; memory and apartheid; gender and care; social justice; and decolonial and feminist pedagogies and research in higher education.