Memory and History in South Africa After the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
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Spectres of the Untold: Memory and History in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Heidi Peta Grunebaum A dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History, University of the Western Cape, December 2006 DECLARATION I, Heidi Peta Grunebaum, declare that ‘Spectres of the Untold: Memory and History in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ is my own work, that it has not been submitted for any degree or examination in any other university, and that all the sources I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by complete references. Heidi Peta Grunebaum 20 December 2006 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements i Introduction 1 Methodological concerns, theoretical framings, historical debts 5 Outline of the work 13 Memory and oblivion 19 Chapter One: Temporalities of the “New Nation: The TRC and the Discursive Power of Transition 20 Truth commissions in global time 22 Marking time before narrative 27 Transition management and the law 32 The TRC, a public project 41 A discourse for the nation 45 Keywords and economies of reference: truth… 49 … and reconciliation 56 Mourning and social regeneration 63 Chapter Two: Disembodiments: Testimony, Narrative and the Commodification of Suffering 68 Shoah testimonies and testimonios 71 Testimony as historical narrative 77 Testimony and listening 79 Voice, nation and the “untold” 84 Media and the commodification of pain 91 Unhinging the political 100 Testimonial appropriations 105 Chapter Three: Kept in Place: Memorial Cartographies and the Politics of Containment 112 Memorial cartographies 115 Containing inscriptions of violence: Cape Town and Thokoza 119 The Island of the Past 126 Counter-memory practices in everyday spaces 134 Transforming place, transferring hope: Athlone 139 Haunting public spaces 146 Chapter Four: Burials and Removals: Historical Erasure and Everyday Life 148 Everyday life 152 The everyday here-and-now 157 Non-responsibility and social denial 161 The “Mother City” 165 Prestwich Street: from burial ground to building site 168 The time of the dead 176 Buried bodies as transient objects 179 Erasing slavery from the cityscape 183 Dislocating forced removals: De Waterkant 184 Erasures-in-time 190 Afterwords 193 Bibliography 195 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Irene Mxinwa. I am deeply grateful to my parents, Brian and Leonie Grunebaum, for their constant and unquestioning support, encouragement and assistance. My indebtedness to them can only be expressed in the ways that I guide, nurture and support my own child. For fierceness, honesty and reminding me to play, I thank my daughter, Arielle Ralph, who has “written” three books, plans more, and cannot understand why I spend so many hours writing yet have still not “made” one. This work has emerged, in its current form, after a long incubation. At times it has taken the phantasmic shape of a golem. At other times, it seemed as if it would be stillborn. That it exists in these words is due to the encouragement, support, patience and, sometimes, tough prodding of many special people. I am indebted to my supervisor, Patricia Hayes, in particular, for all of the above and much more. My largest debt is to Yazir Henri, partner, friend and interlocutor. Each chapter of this work is infused with the spirit of our years of shared enquiry, constant dialogue and working together. A number of people, who in very different ways - as friends, colleagues, teachers, as seekers of knowledge, as social and political activists - have supported, taught and inspired me. I acknowledge them deeply, but may only fully come to understand what they have imparted to me in the course of my own life’s passage: Yazir Henri, Usche Merk, Shifra Jacobson, Isabel Balseiro, Alejandro Castillejo-Cuellar, Doro Peyko, Marianne Hirsch, Sue Cooper, Scott Veitch, John Stratton, David Bunn (my first supervisor at the University of the Western Cape), Oren Stier, Steven Robins, Undine Kaiser, Erhard Eller, Noeleen Murray, Michael Weeder, Bonita Bennett, Nkululeko Booysen, Mxolisi Mbilatshwa, Vuyani Mamani, Lizo Ndzabela, Mzoxolo Ndita, Mike Abrams, Hillary Morris and Paul Hendricks. I remain profoundly indebted to the Direct Action Centre for Peace and Memory for offering me a supportive and generous institutional space as well as an engaged and challenging intellectual and activist space between 1999 and 2006. A large portion of the research and writing of this dissertation was completed during a visiting research associateship at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town between July 2005 and May 2006. I am deeply grateful to the director, staff and colleagues at CAS for providing me with a supportive and collegial environment in which to reflect, research and write. The financial assistance of what was previously the Centre for Science Development (HSRC, South Africa), and now the NRF (National Research Foundation) towards this research is hereby acknowledged. The opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are my own and not necessarily to be attributed to the Centre for Science Development. i INTRODUCTION THE LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES OF INTEGRATING ATROCITY From the horizon of the distant past an immense sad wind, like an endless sorrow, gusts and blows through the cities, through the villages, and through my life. Bao Nin, The Sorrow of War Recordar: To remember; from the Latin re-cordis, to pass back through the heart Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces The time of “transition” to constitutional democracy in South Africa has been one of great hopefulness, of vertiginous possibility and expectation, of quiet sadness and reflection, of much joy and celebration, of contradictions and vexing complexity. The labour of rendering the breathtaking extent of colonial and Apartheid atrocity intelligible has but tentatively begun. Unravelling the lived inscriptions of layer upon layer of sentient injustice that have marked the everyday through the passage of the past three hundred and fifty years in these southernmost parts of the African continent, is only starting. In the global political and moral imaginary the “new” South Africa, however, has come to figure in two fairly stark ways: either as the “miracle” of reconciliation in which the moral victory of good (the struggle against Apartheid) has prevailed against evil (white supremacist rule), or as yet another instance of the failure of neoliberal macroeconomics where huge class disparities, social inequity and structural poverty increasingly paint a gritty canvas depicting the horizons of society as crisis, despair and struggle. Whilst both views hold implicit (though programmatically incompatible) assumptions about time, about history and about oppression, they are seldom interrogated 1 in the light of what remains vexing, creative, resilient, hopeful, human and, therefore, irreducible in the picture. This work is a meditation on the shaping of time and its impact on living with and understanding atrocity in South Africa in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It is an examination of the ways that the institutionalization of memory has managed perceptions of time and “transition”, of events and happenings, of sense and emotion, of violence and recovery, of the “past” and the “new”. Through this process a public language of “memory” has been carved into collective modes of meaning-making. It is a language that seems bereft of the hopes, dreams and possibilities for the promise of a just and redemptive future it once nurtured. In a review of poet, Rustum Kozain’s collection, This Carting Life, Jeremy Cronin captures these sentiments when he writes that “[t]he prevailing sense of loss [in the collection] is not a pining for a dreadful apartheid past but, rather, a conviction that our present reality is less than we had struggled for, less, perhaps, than we deserved.”1 As time has been made and marked the synchronous moments of human agency, resilience and creativity have been rendered into “events”, into commemorations of times passed. A tight weave of compelling and dominant regimes of meaning, sewn together by and through the “publicly” interpolated process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, has rendered lived time into an object and commodity called, the “past”. And it is through the experiential optic of memory that the “past” may be accessed. Of course, the certainties and 1 Jeremy Cronin, “Kozain carts loss into our SA present as poetry” in Sunday Independent (9 September 2005), p.18. 2 foreclosures of the “past”, in contradistinction to the “new” and to the now, are not uncontested. The signs of a more fractious unstitching of the meanings of the “past”, and therefore of lived time, have begun to show (o f which this work is but one instance). And it is this close weft of normative assumptions, meanings and perceptions that is the TRC’s legacy which the work of unstitching must tackle. For, insinuated in different ways in the global and national imaginary, the TRC has been one of the most powerful institutional processes to shape the contours of historical and national “consciousness” since South Africa’s political change to constitutional democracy. Increasingly, as truth commissions have become de rigueur state-instituted tools of transitional justice for countries that emerge from long periods of administrative oppression and atrocity (particularly in the global South), they are becoming deeply and ambivalently threaded into the