The Truth Commission and Post-Apartheid Literature in South Africa

Jerusalema, a Heritage Day Song of the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The process of the TRC in South Africa, unlike others such as that in Chile, was conducted in public, with the intention of granting amnesty to individuals who provided "full disclosure" of politically motivated crime (Graham 2003). Thus, amnesty was used as a vehicle for unearthing the truth about the past.…”

“…Thus, amnesty was used as a vehicle for unearthing the truth about the past. The TRC' mandate was, "to establish as complete a picture as possible of the causes, nature and extent of the gross violations of human rights" committed from 1960 to 1994 and to compile a report of the Commission's findings and conclusions (Graham 2003).…”

The Human Rights Torture Novel

“…A second position adopted by such novels towards TRCs treats recall as necessary for a worldwide trauma‐memory citizenship so that everybody becomes witness to the horror. The challenge, as Shane Graham has noted, ‘is to make it possible for every version of the Truth to be aired without erasing or excluding the victims of apartheid's ravages’ (Graham , 28). HR novels lay overt emphasis on language, narrative, on storytelling and on documentation for the purpose of bearing witness.…”

“…Exploring the link between literature and Human Rights (HR), critics have identified the novel as the pre‐eminent form in which the debates around the ‘subject’ of HR might be centred (Dawes ; Slaughter ; Anker ). Other scholars studying institutional processes such as Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) also identify the novel as the genre in which the complexities of public truth‐telling, amnesty and reconciliation are best explored (Graham ; Gready ). Elizabeth Anker proposes that liberal conceptualizations of Rights ‘imagine’ that ‘rights … inhabit an always already fully integrated and inviolable body: a body that is whole, autonomous and self‐enclosed … purged of … assumedly anarchic appetencies: its needs and desires, its vulnerability and decay’ (Anker , 3).…”

The Struggle of Memory against Forgetting: Afterlife and Memorialization of Imagery Surrounding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

“…Her work brings to the forefront questions about trauma and its lingering effects, and how trauma survivors continue to be "haunted" by the past. 11 Part 3 centers on Three Essays on Shame, by Penny Siopis, the dichotomy and overlap between the personal/private sphere and the political/public sphere, and Sigmund Freud's notion of a "second wounding"-a dredging up of a memory fragment from where it has been buried. 12 Part 4 looks at Discoloured, by Berni Searle, homing in on the implications of the piece's physicality and framing her work within the sociological context of the Coloured community's heritage and history.…”