Our Generation
by Zubeida Jaffer
(Kwela )
If we accept that at least part of the present tension in our society is one of “memory against forgetting”, we must accept the challenge to wade through memories — including badly written memoirs and narratives that come across as superficial or just bland.
Occasionally one comes across a book that breaks this mould, giving us a powerfully written, dramatic new angle on the struggle against apartheid and real insight into the human cost of resistance — as Zubeida Jaffer’s autobiography does.
Jaffer was a journalist with the Cape Times and later worked with community newspapers in the Western Cape. She grew up in a Muslim family that had long been a part of local resistance politics — her earlier memories include the death of Imam Haroun in detention in 1969.
By the 1980s she was a community activist on the Cape Flats and helped set up the United Democratic Front. She was regularly harassed by the security police, detained and subjected to physical and mental torture.
Her accounts of intimidation by interrogators are among the most harrowing in political literature I’ve read, not least because of the simplicity with which she recounts them.
She has chosen not to pursue a simple linear narrative — from early activism to her testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — but, rather, shifts between past and present. The effect is powerful, demonstrating how a person is a sum of experiences, beliefs and commitments.
Yet this literary technique is also risky: for those whose knowledge of the events she recounts are limited, it is deeply confusing.
But the story Jaffer tells is one that deserves to be heard. These memoirs, passionately told, offer us all a sign of hope that the courage to challenge injustice has not been totally extinguished by smug self-interest.