Abstract
There are strong dominant discourses across the intersecting spacings of transitional justice, ‘human rights archives’, and reckoning with the past. The power of these discourses can close down non-orthodox perspectives and fresh lines of enquiry. The dual goals of the paper are to identify such lines of enquiry and tease out loose threads in the dominant discourses. The result is a provocation ranging from the experiences of the Nelson Mandela Foundation to the work of deconstruction, from queer theory to legal scholarship, and from personal narrative to documentary film-making. The paper is at once a troubling of dominant discourses and a play with the antonyms of remembering in these discourses.
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Notes
The Global Leadership Academy is an initiative of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Countries represented in the Mandela Dialogues are Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Kenya, Serbia, South Africa and Uruguay.
A land restitution process was put in place by the first post-apartheid government. It is aimed at either returning land or providing compensation to people forcibly removed in the period 1913–1994. Since 1994 over 76,000 land restitution claims have been settled, but it is estimated that close to 90 % of these have related to land in urban areas. Progress in rural areas has been painfully slow.
The TRC recommended a robust and systematic programme of prosecutions against perpetrators who either failed to get amnesty or chose not to apply for it. A handful of prosecutions were completed during the TRC’s lifespan. But since completion of the TRC’s work, to my knowledge, only two prosecutions have taken place. It seems clear now that the state has, effectively, embraced a blanket amnesty for apartheid-era perpetrators.
The first paragraph of this section on healing elaborates on lines of enquiry I first published in Harris (2012).
The work of the South African non-governmental organisation Khulumani Support Group (KSG), which provides support to apartheid-era ‘victims’, attests to the elusiveness of healing, even for those who participated in the TRC. Interview with KSG Director, Marjorie Jobson, 27 January 2014.
The apartheid state classified South Africans in four racial categories: ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘coloured’ and ‘Indian’. The bantustans were areas where black South Africans could supposedly exercise full rights as citizens. In the 1980s coloured and Indian South Africans could supposedly exercise full rights as citizens through a tricameral parliament and state administration for whites, coloureds and Indians. The word Askari was used to describe persons who had been members of a liberation movement but been ‘turned’ by the apartheid security establishment.
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I am grateful to all those who have offered comments, including the two anonymous Archival Science readers.
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Harris, V. Antonyms of our remembering. Arch Sci 14, 215–229 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9221-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9221-5