Hospitality in a Postapartheid Archive: Reflections on There Was This Goat and the Challenge of Alterity

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission helped to reconstitute the South African archive as more open, more self-reflexive, more hospitable to those previously marginalized by poverty and racial injustice, but its disciplinary and ethical framework produced new norms and exclusions. A recent book, There Was This Goat, co-authored by writer Antjie Krog, linguist Nosisi Mpolweni, and psychologist Kopano Ratele, investigates the "incomprehensible" testimony of Mrs. Konile, mother of a murdered ANC activist. In trying to imagine a new public drawn together in the spirit of ubuntu, it raises troubling questions about accommodating alterity. The fragmented nature of the book shows up the impossibility of achieving coherence in the name of hospitality. I reflect on the construction of what seems "strange" within the postapartheid archive and on the role of the archive itself in underwriting particular notions of citizenship and belonging. Greater openness may call for a relinquishing of certainty and sovereignty, and a willingness not to comprehend.