Abstract
The histories of Southern African postcolonies which experienced decolonization and political transition during the 1980s and early 1990s are deeply entangled, creating the potential for transnational regional remembrance. However, memories of these periods that celebrate liberation and the formation of postcolonial states have largely been instrumentalized within nationalist imaginaries. Turning to the practices of literature and film in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe, this chapter asks whether we can trace alternative regional memoryscapes that encompass reflections on the violence of decolonization as well as the continuing coloniality, thus involving critiques of mainstream memorialization. The reading engages with critical memory in the novels published at the turn of the millennium and by the authors of the younger, “born free” generation, during the late 2010s. It traces the dynamics of mnemonic frameworks through which the shared historical experiences of colonial and apartheid violence, decolonization and the post-conflict present are mediated. This dynamic involves a shift from practices of witnessing and testifying to the violence of decolonization towards more recent articulations of memory that create activist genealogies of tackling coloniality across the periods of resisting colonialism, anti-apartheid struggle, and the contemporary critique of post-transitional/post-independence politics which are tied in with protest movements. The recent productions create frameworks of embodied (post)memory that focus on structural violence and its longue durée in the postcolony, representing the traumas of decolonization as traumas of coloniality—of the past relations that reproduce themselves in the present. These structures of timelessness, however, also involve a hopeful dimension: they evoke inspiring stories, un-forgetting, and passing on.
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Notes
- 1.
An example of a region-wide dialogue through such productions of memory is the series Landscapes of Memory (1999) which included documentaries from Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa produced by local directors and reflecting specific contexts while being interconnected through themes of trauma, memory and reconciliation (c.f. Mhando and Tomaselli 2009).
- 2.
The establishment of independent governments and (formal) democracies did not result in the termination of large-scale violence and armed conflict. In Zimbabwe, which achieved independence in 1980, the ZANU-PF confronted resistance by the rival party and responded with massacring around 20,000 of “dissidents” and civilians in Matabeleland North between 1982 and 1987 (operation “Gukurahundi”). In South Africa, the transition period of 1990–1994 saw an escalation of violence resulting in the death toll estimated between 5000 and 14,000 cases which were hardly discussed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995–1998). The more recent occurrence of state-supported violence against striking miners at Marikana in 2012 demonstrates continuities between the practices of the apartheid and post-apartheid state.
- 3.
Sara Baartman was a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited at human zoos in Britain and France during the early nineteenth century and examined by anatomists as a “link” between animals and humans.
- 4.
In South Africa, the most prominent example has been the #RhodesMustFall movement against the colonial monuments. In Namibia, there exists activism for the remembrance of the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904–1908; the German government officially recognized this event as genocide in May 2021. In Zimbabwe, decolonial memory practices involve drawing on traditional spirituality and ideas of justice in addressing colonial and postcolonial violence orchestrated by the state (Morreira 2016, 57–88).
- 5.
Marianne Hirsch’s term that “describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up” (Hirsch 2008, 106).
- 6.
“Decolonial critique” here refers to the practices of delinking from the colonial matrix of power in attempting to establish socio-cultural relations of a different kind. This critical approach draws on Franz Fanon’s analysis of continuing colonialism and the pitfalls of decolonisation and develops it with regard to present-day conditions while imagining ways of overcoming this regime (Quijano 2000; Maldonado-Torres 2007).
- 7.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the support of the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies in Warsaw and the EURIAS Fellowship Programme of the European Commission (Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Actions—COFUND Programme—FP7) during my research and writing of this chapter.
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Robbe, K. (2022). Remembering the Violence of (De)colonization in Southern Africa: From Witnessing to Activist Genealogies in Literature and Film. In: Lewis, S., Olick, J., Wawrzyniak, J., Pakier, M. (eds) Regions of Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93705-8_8
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