"Nice Audible Crying": Editions, Testimonies, and Country of My Skull

Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull sets victim and perpetrator testimonies excerpted from for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission beside an Afrikaner reporter's responses to the hearings. On one hand, Krog renders the position of the Afrikaner complex by presenting four first person narrators who trouble a singular notion of accountability and complicity; on the other hand, Krog either distills individual testimonies into national allegories or uses the testimonies as backdrops for the reporter's emotional journey. Both become a concern in the consideration of the ways in which the text has been taken up internationally as a documentary record of the apartheid era and as representative text of the "new South Africa." The problems evident in the South African edition are extended in the American edition of the text, published two years after the original with added paratextual information and excised ambiguous and context-specific references. In this article I elaborate on the differences between the editions, and compare them with victim testimonies from the TRC transcripts, in order to critique what happens when the TRC is read outside South Africa.