Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

Introduction: Memory and Amnesia after Apartheid

The end of apartheid and the transition to parliamentary democracy brought to the surface a host of deeply entrenched tensions that were long suppressed under white minority rule. Yet as the “new nation” has struggled to establish a firm footing, the lingering ghosts of the past have continued to haunt the present. As retired South African constitutional court justice Albie Sachs once suggested, “We all know where South Africa is, but we do not yet know what it is.”1 The dilemma—at once ethical and practical— confronting the creation of the “new South Africa” has revolved around how much of the past to preserve and remember and how much to erase and forget .2 According to John Gillis, national identity depends upon the creation of a “sense of sameness” stretched over time and distributed over space, that is to say, a “structure of feeling” (to borrow a phrase from Raymond Williams ) that is sustained by the intertwined processes of remembering and forgetting.3 The imbricated layering of the hybrid histories of early colonization, settler colonialism, racial segregation, and apartheid—along with both organized and unorganized resistance to these forms of oppression—combined over time to produce a complex and sometimes confusing legacy of multiple identities all linked to different memories of the past and all vying for a stake in the shaping of the “new South Africa.”4 As a consequence of this peculiar history of racial oppression, the past—and the collective recollection of it— 1 Introduction Memory and Amnesia after Apartheid 2 introduction occupies a complex, contradictory, and deeply ambivalent place in the new post-apartheid social order.5 Fluid, unstable, and ambiguous identities in the “new South Africa” invariably produce tremendous social, political, and psychological tensions, which in turn give rise to sometimes unexpected anxieties and fears.6 The unsettled circumstances that accompanied the birth of the “new South Africa” gave rise to complex and often bitter conflicts over how to define, remember, and commemorate the fragmented past. As Marita Sturken has argued, the practice of collective remembrance is always a field of politico-cultural contestation, negotiation, and compromise in which different stories compete for their own place in history.7 Despite the rhetorical flourishes about “new beginnings” and “starting afresh,” the birth of the “new South Africa” did not take place outside its own historicity.8 The matter of the “afterlife” of white minority rule—that is, the ways in which white minority rule “remains an ineradicable trace” in the everyday life of postapartheid South Africa—has remained an irredeemable part of the present.9 This lack of consensus over what to remember and what to let go engendered a kind of memory crisis, putting in motion disputes over what is deemed worthyofremembering,andultimatelywhatcollectiveremembrancemeans, particularly with respect to what needs, interests, and fantasies it satisfies, and what is to be forgotten.10 Disputes over the past reflect deeper and farreaching struggles for control over the future.11 Yet memory, whether individual or collective, is a notoriously slippery term that lacks the analytic rigor so often attributed to it. The unanticipated consequence of the recent fascination with collective remembrance—what some scholars have referred to as the “memory boom”—has been to elevate the conceptual status of collective memory.12 Used carelessly, collective memory , it appears, has sometimes assumed the exalted role of a metatheoretical trope and has laid claim to the valorized position—once exclusively reserved for empirically verifiable truth—as a privileged site of authenticity.13 Where scholars once talked about folk history, popular history, oral history, or public history (and even myth and commemorative rituals more generally) as separate fields of inquiry, they increasingly turned to collective memory as a metahistorical category that subsumes all of these under a single rubric of “memory studies.”14 introduction 3 In warning against the “terminological profusion” and “semantic overload ” of collective memory, a number of scholars have argued that the overextended and sometimes indiscriminate use of the term can result not only in conceptual confusion but also in unwarranted entanglements with such related ideas as cultural identity, subjective experience, and popular consciousness .15 The inherent danger of “memory” is its seductiveness as an allencompassing term without precise meaning.16 As Kerwin Lee Klein has argued, the extravagant employment of memory has enabled it to figure as “the therapeutic alternative to historical discourse.”17 The difficulty of attaching a generally agreed-upon definition to “memory...