Healing South African Wounds/Guérir les blessures de l’Afrique du Sud (review)

Gilles Teulié and Mélanie Joseph-Vilan’s edited volume Healing South African Wounds forms part of a large body of scholarship on South Africa’s democratic transition. Much of this work focuses on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). As it explores processes of social repair since 1994—when Nelson Mandela famously asked South Africans to “heal the wounds” created by apartheid—Teulié and Joseph-Vilan’s volume certainly addresses the TRC. However, rather than confining their analysis to this institution, Teulié and Joseph-Vilan design their book to place it within a social continuum. They also ask readers to expand their vision of “healing” from issues of historical racial oppression to wider social and economic transformation. As Richard Samin points out in an essay positioned as the volume’s second introductory chapter, “If the now familiar formula ‘healing the wounds of the past’ means anything its semantic range should be extended beyond its racial content to include current social and political ‘unhealed wounds’ which . . . constitute a backlog of the apartheid era” (24). These include “poverty, housing, crime, unemployment, [and] health” (24).

The wide scope of the volume’s inquiry, as well as its interdisciplinary approach, can be seen in its constitutive sections. The book follows a loose progression from confronting painful histories to designing a better future. After Teulié and Joseph-Vilan’s introduction and Samin’s overview of the “divisive issues” confounding the current state, different sections explore the role of literature and film in confronting the legacies of apartheid; the ability of novels and the mainstream media to address the needs of women; new assessments of the TRC’s impact on public culture; divergent reactions of the Afrikaner community to democracy; and changing child welfare and education policy. The essays in these sections—written by literary critics, historians, scholars of religion, and social workers—are straightforward and accessible, providing a good introduction to their topics. Of particular interest to readers of RAL might be Sandra Saayman’s analysis of Ivan Vladislavic’s “Curiouser,” which unpacks the difficulty of claiming an “African” identity in contemporary South Africa, and Sheila Collingwood-Whittick’s reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, which explores Coetzee’s tangled links to Afrikanerdom.

Building on these diverse contributions, the editors argue: “[A]s a process healing is largely underway in South Africa, but as a result it seems a far more elusive goal” (21). This is a persuasive answer to the book’s central “question,” that of “healing South African wounds” (21). What one might wish for is a bit more critical reflection on the question itself. In their introduction, Teulié and Joseph-Vilan suggest that healing, among a cluster of related definitions, is fundamentally about moving beyond apartheid-era divisions to create “a unified national identity which would enable all citizens to be part of a multi-ethnic nation” (9). The idea of “national healing” repeats the problematic slippage often seen in discussions of the TRC between the individual and the political or national “body”—a slippage that is not fully addressed in the volume. Similarly, the editors occasionally seem to repeat without questioning the TRC slogan that “revealing is healing” (15), a slogan that is complicated in some of the later sections (see for instance Steven Gish’s piece on the amnesty of Amy Biehl’s murderers). In other words, a more complex theorization of the trope that structures this collection could strengthen what is generally an informative, wide-ranging, and engaging volume.