Claudia Braude
Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa edited by Carli Coetzee and Sarah Nuttall (Oxford, R110)
South African academics and artists have discovered the memory market, a thriving area in the United States and elsewhere. In Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, editors Carli Coetzee and Sarah Nuttall have successfully brought together an extensive range of discussions about the production of memory in contemporary South Africa.
The book presents discussion of the relation between private and collective memory in post-apartheid autobiography, juxtaposed with the silencing tactics of perpetrators’ confessions. For instance, Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool trace the similarities between the uses made of oral histories by Wits historian Charles van Onselen in The Seed Is Mine, and of apartheid survivors by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
Sinfree Makoni explores the ongoing impact of the creation and use of standardised African languages on the form and substance of African communal memory.
We don’t yet know how the simultaneous translation of TRC testimony into English has affected and restricted the production and organisation of new, post-apartheid knowledge. A range of African linguistic skills presumably enjoyed by only two of the book’s 16 contributors (Makoni and Njabulo Ndebele) remains to be brought to bear before we’ll begin to know how the organisation of memory has been transposed into its expression in English.
In the meantime, we are left with some older voices trying to shape the organisation of memory of apartheid. While the contributors individually and collectively theorise the nature of post-apartheid knowledge, award-winning novelist and academic Andr Brink provides the most systematic attempt to do so. Along with other contributors, Brink is concerned with the role of the writer in producing history “at the end of apartheid”. He, however, doubts the possibility of either historical truth or facts. “We now accept,” he assumes his reader to concur, “that history ‘as such’ is simply … inaccessible.”
Memories inevitably undergo “some measure of distortion which would render them unreliable (in the sense in which some evidence in a court of law would be regarded as unreliable).” Brink consequently promotes fiction and storytelling as appropriate forms of remembering the past. “The representations of history repeat, in almost every detail, the processes of fiction,” he says.
He reads Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood’s “textualisation of history” in her recent Alias Grace to comment on the production of history. In the novel, the murderer Grace Marks becomes “entangled in a patchwork” of different versions of the murder she committed years before: “I can remember what I said when arrested, and what Mr MacKenzie the lawyer said I should say, and what I did not say even to him; and what I said at the trial, and what I said afterwards, which was different as well. And what McDermot said I said, and what the others said I must have said …”
Brink offers this as a commentary on the TRC: “This testimony becomes especially revealing if it is read against the background of the activation of public memory in the workings of the TRC in South Africa.”
Brink establishes an opposition between historical truth and a range of competing versions of the past: “Story does not presume to bring to light ‘the’ truth, but at most a version of it. And its value resides in allowing the reader to compare a variety of available versions in order either to choose among them or to construct a composite image from all of them.”
His denial of the possibility of truth in the face of the shifting nature of memory fails to include any differentiation, such as that made by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, between the deliberate reconstruction of memories by perpetrators seeking to avoid guilt or punishment, and the shift in survivors’ memories as they relive traumatic experiences.
Brink’s seemingly detached theoretical contemplation on the relation between history and story, between fact and fiction, cuts quietly and directly into the TRC’s historical legitimacy. FW de Klerk, in his submission to the TRC, adopted the same pose: “The commission should … consider the elusive nature of ‘truth’ in an historical or political context.”
Brink’s intentions are presumably not the same as De Klerk’s. This is why his insufficient care to avoid lending theoretical affirmation to the latter is so unfortunate. The same is true of many of the book’s contributors who, seeking, for a range of different reasons, to avoid a new hegemonic reading of history arising from the TRC, refer throughout to “versions of the past”. No attempt is made in the book’s introductory overview to comment on the dangers of such historical relativism.
Yet, in her powerful essay on recent developments in the construction of Afrikaner identity, including attempts to find a connection with an African identity “by reclaiming as their foremother the Khoi woman Krotoa”, Carli Coetzee warns that “the admission of, or claim to, hybrid identity and Khoikhoi blood can have a conservative impulse: it risks forgetting the conflict and destruction involved in the mix”.
And, in her discussion of architect Hilton Judin’s work, Ingrid de Kok says that “what he suggested is that despite powerful resistance to it, the apartheid state’s discourse may have become so deeply introjected that its constructions and representations still determine the way we define ourselves now in space and time”.
The contributors to Negotiating the Past are grappling with the difficulties of developing a new civic language unsullied by apartheid’s construction of the truth. While they are not always successful, these discussions are important landmarks in the mapping of contemporary South African historical consciousness.