Another Country: Amnesia and Memory in Contemporary South Africa

In 1995, American Vogue published a fashion article cum travelogue under the rubric “South Africa Now.” Offered as a celebration of the country’s recent democratic elections, it featured the Somali supermodel Iman and her husband David Bowie visiting sites in and around Cape Town—dressed, of course, in fabulously expensive designer clothes. The article opens impressively, with a picture of Iman shaking hands with Nelson Mandela (“an historic meeting,” we are told). This dignified image is followed by a series of joyous fashion pics: Iman dancing on the streets of Guguletu township in a Jil Sander suit and Mandela T-shirt, posing at a Cape Town high school in a Gucci skirt, kissing on the beach in a Chanel ballgown, and striding past bright graffiti in a Gaultier frock. Facing this last image, we encounter—and perhaps we should have seen something like this coming—a shot of Archbishop Tutu working out on his treadmill, looking both sporty and meditative in a Duke University sweatsuit. The article ends with a black-and-white photograph of a zebra running along a deserted roadway towards a mountainous horizon: an emblem, clearly, of the multiracial nation, moving towards what Vogue calls “an exciting future.”

The article displays (with considerable panache) a mythic and newly consumable South Africa. The “now” announced in its title effects, as it were, an erasure of the whole history of violence and injustice. In these images the Cape becomes an austral playground, where the past is redeemed by the click of a fashion photographer’s shutter. The sites, the icons and the grass-roots agents of the anti-apartheid struggle—so often a war waged by school children—all become colorfully exotic, chic, even cute: suitable background for the antics of multicultural celebrities. The differences in the experiences and achievements of the photos’ various subjects—president, cleric, fashion model, and rock star—are visually irrelevant: Mandela, Tutu, Iman, and Bowie are all equated as Beautiful People in a world of pure appearances. The nation itself is magically transformed—figured as an elegant thing of nature, instantly unified in its coat of harmonious black-and-white stripes.¹

Vogue’s visual indulgence in the “South African miracle” is neither unique nor really reprehensible: there was, after all, much reason to celebrate in 1994 and to take considerable aesthetic pleasure, after years of seeing the Old Crocodile and his cronies in office, in a president who was not only a man of moral stature, but of a certain physical grace. Four years down the line, however, a fixation on “Madiba magic” and an exclusive concern with “now” and the “future” seem somewhat more problematic. With the ANC’s apparent adoption of all the orthodoxies of globalization, it has come to seem as though the hard-fought liberation struggle was only about winning a larger share of the pie (for some) and achieving a redeemed visibility in the global public sphere. The past and its lessons too often appear to have been forgotten. Even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s task of exhuming the grim secrets of the apartheid régime has occasionally generated what the poet Ingrid de Kok terms “a rhetoric of amnesia”: its work has been associated, even by the commissioners themselves, with “a clean break,” a “new chapter,” “getting the past out of the way,” and so forth.²

It is against this rhetoric of amnesia that Jeremy Cronin’s long-awaited second collection of poetry, Even the Dead: Poems, Parables, and a Jeremiad, is pitched. The collection is offered as wake-up call (“Art is the struggle to stay awake” [40] is one of its memorable lines). In the “jeremiad” of the title, Cronin mercilessly and sometimes wittily diagnoses the nation’s pervasive amnesia; he laments the country’s entry into the postmodern world:

It’s amnesia when the SATV launches itself into
  the new South
Africa and lands
    In Las...