“Language Rules”: Witnessing about Trauma on South Africa’s TRC

"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 is called the necklace game," the leader said. "This is just going to be pretend necklace, not the real thing," she said. She pushed the other girls aside as if to open up the stage. Rotating through the role of victim, then killers, then onlookers, she seemed to my amazement to recall virtually everything that actually happened in a real "necklace" murder, even though she hadn't been born when the last necklace killing occurred in her township.

She flailed her arms, screaming in mock anguish as if being beaten, swaying back and forth, turning her head from left to right, and begging for mercy with eyes wide open to show fright. Then she switched roles and play-acted someone going off to find petrol, then another person offering matches, then someone running to demand a car tire from an imaginary passing motorist.

"Give me your tire," she ordered with mock hostility. She narrated the part of the motorist dutifully obeying, then the petrol man, then the matches man. Finally, she returned to her victim role, struggling against the make-believe tire placed around her neck. Nervously, she made a gesture simulating the striking of a match, as if her friends—now a crowd of executioners—had forced her to set herself alight.

As imaginary flames engulfed her, she threw her arms wildly into the air. "Now sing and clap your hands and dance. I'm dying," she said. Her friends started clapping and singing in a discordant rhythm. They formed a circle and went round and round her "body." Gradually, the high-pitched screams of the girl with the imaginary tire around her neck faded into a whimper as her life ebbed away. Consumed by the flames, she slowly lowered herself to the ground and "died." It was all make-believe.

None of the girls I saw reenacting the necklace game that morning had actually witnessed a necklace murder. But the unspoken events of the past—the silence of Mlungisi's lambs—had become imprinted on their minds. It was not just the outward form of the game, but its inner meaning, the sense of trauma to communal life that it carried with it. They carried the collective horror somewhere deep within them. Reenacting the death dance of the necklace victim may well have been a way of transforming its memory into something more accessible and less fearful for the girls.

This incident provides an illuminating metaphor for the way in which trauma is passed on intergenerationally "in ways subtle and not so subtle" through silences, fear, and through the psychological scars and pain that are often left unacknowledged. The questions that remain for us when we witness a scene such as this one are: Did they witness it? If they only heard about it without witnessing it, how could they so accurately reenact it?

The language of violence is etched in...