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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Engaging the Apartheid past through �Healing of Memories�
| Panel |
49. The politics of healing and justice in post-conflict societies: Global discourses and local realities
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| Paper ID | 220 |
| Author(s) |
Kayser, Undine E.M.
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | The paper explores the process and effects of the Healing of Memories (HOM) project in shaping interpersonal relations in post-apartheid Cape Town. HOM is a civil society initiative established in 1996 to facilitate encounters between South Africans previously divided on the basis of race and class. Its work has subsequently been extended to (post)conflict sites around the world. The HOM initiative drew from and extended some of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), particularly its discourse of reconciliation. The paper argues that, in the attempt to build a shared democratic culture among ordinary citizens in post-apartheid South Africa, not enough attention is being paid to the transformation of the interpersonal domain. The discussion points out the importance of lived, local, ongoing encounters between ordinary people who take cognizance of the apartheid past - encounters which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) helped frame but could not facilitate. The paper also explores some of the critiques of the reconciliation discourse in South Africa, in particular the inability of the TRC to pay sufficient attention to more ordinary forms of suffering and benefit and to address the challenges in transforming relations between South Africans in their everyday interactions.
In the context of the stark socio-spatial legacies of apartheid, the paper argues that there are few processes in the afterworld of the TRC in which ordinary social actors can explore their respective subject positions under apartheid and grapple with the emerging subjectivities of the post-apartheid sphere face-to-face with the former racial ‘Other’. While HOM hoped that its intervention would create the basis for ‘a shared understanding of the past’, participants inevitably brought into the ‘safe’ space their experiences of apartheid, including embodied practices of avoidance and experiences of harm. In the face of facilitators’ attempts at producing ‘reconciliation’, the process revealed underlying conflicts and enabled confrontation, moments of honesty and vulnerability that, the paper argues, remained both full of risk and possibility. Conventional understandings of self, ‘Other’ and history were unsettled, leading participants to ‘make connections’ between past and present, between the personal and the political, and between their own and other’s expectations and hopes for change. The experiential-emotional dimension of such encounters through memory revealed some of the underlying ‘structures of feeling’ and their impact on the ‘formations of relationship’, which continuously hinder the search for new and meaningful ways of being social.
The paper proposes that, at best, such encounters led to the forging of a temporary ‘community of sentiment’, based on a core set of ‘new’ social skills: response-ability, conflict-ability and soci-ability. While participants were unable to succeed in their attempts at re-creating the community of sentiment outside the workshop environment, the experience produced the imaginative ground for new forms of intersubjectivity in the post-apartheid sphere.
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