Abstract
This chapter explores the intergenerational transmission of nostalgic memory in the context of a Cape Town township called Bonteheuwel, haunted by memories of apartheid forced removal and present conditions of violence. It draws on focus group research into the way in which young South Africans narrate their experiences of encountering their parents’ memories of apartheid, a time before their birth. It demonstrates how the sensuous and embodied nature of nostalgic “memory encounters” between generations, allows the more silenced traumatic aspects of history to surface for these young South Africans. At the same time, they provide the youth of South Africa with a source from which to imagine and articulate their hopes for the future, in a context that remains plagued by violence. Thus, it is argued that while nostalgia for the past can transfer traumatic memory to future generations, these memories can also contain the seeds of critical hope for imagining new futures.
[They] miss those days, you can hear it in their voices… as my mom and them, they were all running around the streets freely, they could play.
—Group One, Bonteheuwel 2017
Those days the people… were free… you could just go to work without being robbed or being stabbed or whatever. But nowadays… it’s got worse.
—Group Two, Bonteheuwel 2017
The A.W. Mellon Foundation provided financial support for the research that informs this chapter. The writing of this chapter was made possible through the support of the South African Research Chair Initiative (SARChI) Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma at Stellenbosch University funded by South Africa National Research Foundation (NRF).
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Notes
- 1.
The Trauma, Memory and Representations of the Past project is a five-year project funded by the A.W. Mellon Foundation. It is led by Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela at the Historical Trauma and Transformation Research Initiative. The research was conducted in collaboration with the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) in 2016. Some of the stories collected in the Life History phase of this research have been published in the recent book These Are the Things That Sit with Us (Gobodo-Madikizela et al. 2019).
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Wale, K. (2020). Intergenerational Nostalgic Haunting and Critical Hope: Memories of Loss and Longing in Bonteheuwel. In: Wale, K., Gobodo-Madikizela, P., Prager, J. (eds) Post-Conflict Hauntings. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39077-8_9
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