River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative

Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla.
“Language Rules”: Witnessing about Trauma on South Africa’s TRC
River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative - Volume 8, Number 2, Spring 2007, pp. 25-33

University of Nebraska Press

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela - "Language Rules": Witnessing about Trauma on South Africa's TRC - River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative 8:2 River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative 8.2 (2007) 25-33 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents "Language Rules" Witnessing about Trauma on South Africa's TRC Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela "Let's play a game." It was strange, almost surreal, to see a group of young girls seven to ten years old laughing and cavorting in the streets of an Eastern Cape township in South Africa -- the Mlungisi Township, the same township that in the mid-1980s had become the scene of so much misery, a tinderbox of inflamed emotion against the inhumanities of apartheid. But that was before these children were even born. I was doing some work in Mlungisi Township and happened to be walking through their neighborhood when I saw them. Their squeals and cries were the very embodiment of joy. My heart leapt. They looked like little tender shoots of foliage -- little blades of life -- poking out from under the cooled lava of the township once utterly devastated by apartheid's volcano. "What game?" the others shouted back, skipping back and forth. "Let me show you," the first one said. She was about eight and looked as if she might be the informal leader of the group. She began to demonstrate. The other girls didn't seem too enthusiastic about this new game. What was wrong with just playing skip? But slowly, they became intrigued. "It...