Introduction
Healing the Wounds: Re/Membering and Reconstructing South Africa
p. 9-21
Texte intégral
1When in 1994 Nelson Mandela delivered his famous speech stating that the time for the healing of the wounds had come, great expectations were raised for most South Africans. Fourteen years have elapsed since then and on the eve of new democratic elections scheduled for 2009, it seems appropriate to examine the way South African society has evolved throughout the post-apartheid years. The issue at stake for South Africa is naturally to create an identity which would enable all citizens to be part of a multi-ethnic nation. Yet individual cultural identities have strongly resisted the will to globalize the country and if each group has granted concessions to the others many difficulties remain.
2The wide debate that centered on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is but one example. Mandela’s choice to create the TRC to deal with the enormous problem of justice brought about by the end of apartheid was received with mixed feelings. Praised around the world as a democratic and human solution to apartheid, it was resented by many people, whatever their community of origin and whatever their status (victims or simple witnesses). Retributive justice had taken on a new meaning, but the extent to which it healed the wounds remains a question to be answered. But the legacy of the TRC has shown how important it is for a nation to revisit its past, as seen with European countries such as Britain and France, which recently looked back at their participation in the slave trade. South Africa had to go through such a process of ‘looking back’ so as to be able to recognize wrongdoings and to formulate sufferings.
3Examining the past has enabled the various South African communities to build their new identity even if the process may sometimes be painful. But the new South Africa also has to prepare the future, and bringing about changes in social welfare and education is a necessary step toward the healing of the wounds.
4In the artistic field, a major question is raised by the very notion of healing in the South African context: can the arts heal very concrete wounds? The issue appears all the more complex as the artistic field was, like South African society as a whole, divided over racial barriers for decades under the apartheid regime. As many critics have pointed out, South African artists were not defined by their nationality, but by their skin colour and by the language they used, which led to an often over-determining categorization process. Healing the wounds of the past in the literary field therefore means trying to do away with this over-determination, turning fault lines into bridges in order to create a national literature and a national culture, to transcend the racial and linguistic patterns which defined the South African arts until 1994.
5From the artistic and cultural point of view, healing the wounds therefore means bridging the gap–between the racial and linguistic categories which had been rigidly defined and perpetuated by apartheid, between the individual and the nation, but also between the emerging South African national culture and the international literary trends, between the particular and the global. In other words, in the artistic field, healing the South African wounds means going back to the etymological sense of the term: ‘making whole’ what used to be divided, mending the cultural fabric of the country to literally re-member South Africa. This implies that healing the wounds of the past also means revisiting history, helping forgotten or silenced voices to emerge or to resurface, and revisiting the racially-defined genres which constituted the literary landscape and were emblematic of the various literatures of South Africa.
6Richard Samin’s article, which opens this collection, both exposes the nature of the South African wounds and suggests how they are being healed. It is not the least merit of this article to demonstrate that the wounds left by apartheid are complex and multifaceted, and to show how the racial/ethnic, linguistic, political, social and economic wounds constitute an intertwined and complex web which is, because of its variety, a challenge for the future. Richard Samin’s article explores how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the ANC have tried to address the many challenges offered by a South African society where fault lines have shifted but where inequalities still pervade all the areas of people’s lives. By looking at such core issues as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, poverty, HIV/AIDS, ethnicization and crime, and by examining both the policies implemented and the people’s reactions to them, Samin stresses the main danger faced by South Africa today: that of becoming ‘a two-faced developmental state’, which would jeopardize the emergence of a national identity in a country where ‘the sense of nationhood is still problematic’. Above all, Samin stresses that South African identity is still very much in the making, and that the ANC has a crucial part to play in dealing with the legacy of apartheid. Although he does not minimise the difficulties faced by the healing process in a society deeply wounded by apartheid, Samin argues that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ‘symbolically initiated a new myth of reconciliation’, and that even if the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ‘could not possibly deal with the entire legacy of apartheid’, it has created ‘a dynamic’, in which he sees the possibility of healing and the seeds of a new society.
7This renegotiation of a common national identity also dominates the current South African literary and cultural landscapes. In his overview of the ‘literary rebirth’ of the country, Manfred Loimeier explores the way writers and publishers have taken up the notion of healing into the artistic field. The main wound inflicted upon authors under apartheid was, Loimeier points out, the heavy weight of politics, which imposed realistic forms and caused artists to be perceived as mere ‘ambassadors of their country’; the end of the apartheid regime has lifted the constraints imposed by censorship and by the regime, and leaves authors free to ‘test, try out and experiment’–to be artists, and artists only. As Loimeier remarks, the new dispensation has created more favourable conditions in the publishing field for young, non-white authors to emerge and for new voices to be heard: many channels are available, from the Internet to literary magazines; literary prizes offer new visibility to a wide range of writers; the Cape Town Book Fair has become a prominent event. The question remains whether all these changes will last, or whether they will be short-lived. After considering the general state of the literary field in the country, Loimeier examines its capacity to ‘heal the wounds’ of the past by looking at individual examples: such diverse writers as Mary Watson, Diane Awerbuck, Chris Van Wyk, Zakes Mda, Antjie Krog, Zoe Wicomb, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Rayda Jacobs, Etienne Van Heerden, Elsa Joubert, Andrew Henry Martin Scholtz or Marlene Van Niekerk... All the works examined, Loimeier suggests, playfully experiment with forms, genres, languages, thanks to ‘the liberation of South African literature from the dogmas of apartheid’, a sign of ‘normalization’. Yet, the healing is not over, and the presence of the past still influences both the works produced by South African writers and their reception– or non-reception, as a number of people still cannot read. Healing designates both a process and its result, and in the literary field, Loimeier suggests that the process is still going on and its result remains to be hoped for and looked forward to.
8Central to the redefinition of South African identity is the question of the Africanness of South African artists. Healing the wounds of the apartheid system implies, for many artists, to ‘re-africanize’ South African art. The debate over the African renaissance initiated by Thabo Mbeki in his ‘I am an African’ speech1 has largely been taken up in the literary field as part of the larger ‘re-membering’ process already mentioned. Sandra Saayman’s article raises this question in relation to Ivan Vladislavic’s ‘Curioser’. Through a close reading of Vladislavic’s text, Saayman puts under scrutiny the way the legacy of apartheid is explored in the artistic field. Her article shows how ‘Curioser’ raises such crucial questions as the relationship between art and money, skin colour and the racial fault lines inherited from apartheid. The central figure of the mask, and the question of its (in) authenticity, points to the fabrication of national and artistic identities, and can be read as an icon of the difficulties and dead-ends faced by South Africans when trying to heal the wounds of the past. Saayman strongly suggests that Vladislavic’s multi-layered text refuses to over-simplify what is at stake and raises more questions than it answers, thus reflecting the complexity, but also the necessity, of the debate over African-ness in South Africa.
9Lydia Martin’s article about Gavin Hood’s successful film Tsotsi also raises the question of national identity in the cultural field. Martin first describes the state of the South African film industry under apartheid before examining how the legacy of apartheid has been taken up by directors since 1994. As in the literary field, the main impediment to creativity was political, and consisted mostly in the heavy weight of political matters and economic conditions, which prevented authors to create, or rather, to create freely. Martin’s article examines how Gavin Hood adapts Tsotsi, a novel written by Athol Fugard under apartheid, and how the shift from paper to screen, and from apartheid South Africa to the new South Africa, serves to heal the wounds of the past. One of the major differences between the original novel and the film is the ending, which is much more optimistic in Hood’s Tsotsi, which Martin sees as much more future-oriented than Fugard’s novel because, she suggests, the end of apartheid has opened up possibilities for the young hero. Interestingly, Martin’s analysis of the film shows how the racial divide is shown to have been replaced by a reflection on, and the foregrounding of, the economic gap between the poor and the rich. Hood’s film therefore reflects some of the main questions raised by Richard Samin in his overview of the South African situation, which suggests that the arts still reflect South African reality, but in a more universal way, as shown by the parallels Martin draws between Tsotsi and the Brazilian film City of God. Tsotsi seems emblematic of a widespread tendency in the artistic field, that of representing the wounds of the past to heal them, connecting them to wider issues not necessarily limited to the South African scene.
10The second section in this volume precisely examines this question of representation, putting under scrutiny the various discourses which were silenced and repressed under apartheid. The three articles in this section all deal with the way oppressed people, and more specifically women, have been represented recently ‘in the media and novels of post-1994 South Africa’ (Wenzel); they all tackle the issue of ‘what and how the media and literature contributed towards “healing the wounds of apartheid” with specific reference to women’ (Wenzel). In these articles, the question of race remains a major factor, but that of gender, which was often secondary under apartheid, comes to the foreground. In her article, Wenzel argues that although the situation of women in the new South Africa still remains problematic, there has clearly been a shift in the area of representation: as women ‘have finally become subjects of discourse’ the wounds of the past can be voiced and the healing process can begin.
11Vicki-Briault-Manus similarly focuses on the voices which were silenced under apartheid and on their re-emergence in the context of the new South Africa. Briault-Manus examines several recent novels, A Duty of Memory by W.P.B. Botha, Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor, The Madonna of Excelsior by Zakes Mda and Playing in the Light by Zoe Wicomb, and shows how the process which was initiated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, namely, that of unveiling the wounds as a prerequisite for healing, features in these novels. Briault-Manus demonstrates that by shifting the focus from the public stage and from politics to private matters these novels point to a kind of healing which is also needed, the healing of the wounds inflicted by apartheid upon individuals as such, and not as members of racial communities. In the case of these novels, Briault-Manus suggests, the healing is based ‘on the hermeneutic process of the revelation of secrets, itself’: revealing is healing.
12Basuli Deb’s article similarly examines the impact of the process initiated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on fiction-writing, showing how novels can articulate stories which were silenced or erased under apartheid, particularly women’s stories, thus contributing to the process of healing through unveiling described by Briault-Manus. Deb’s study of Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story focuses on gender issues which were, once again, hidden under apartheid because what prevailed was ‘the myth of revolutionary unity against the apartheid regime’. Ranging from the general to the particular, from an overview of the representation of women in the media and novels in general to a close reading of a specific novel, the three articles in this section offer a picture of healing as unveiling in the literary field, all suggesting that to heal the wounds of the past, all the voices of South Africa need to be heard: without representation, there can be no healing.
13The third section of this volume leaves the literary field to delve into the social and political legacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Coming to terms with a violent past is not an easy process and can lead to dissatisfaction. Much praised worldwide as a positive way of dealing with what might have turned into a witch hunt, the Commission brought many answers to the people looking for lost relatives and friends. Yet throughout the process of the hearings many aspects emerged which brought criticism to the way the different cases were dealt with and amnesty granted, sometimes opposing individual reconstruction and national reconciliation. The three articles of this section focus on different aspects of the Commission and its reports, showing the reality of the results of the hearings compared to the official conclusions reached by its members.
14Siphiwe Ignatius Dube shows that the very structure of the Commission and the way it dealt with the issues tackled enabled the emergence of a specific type of democracy despite the fact the public was manipulated into accepting this new concept of justice: amnesty, not retribution is granted against truth. He argues that as a transitional body, the TRC had a very positive effect in helping an oppressed society get access to a democratic culture, but its methods were questionable as they led to contradictions which, for some people, discredited part of its results.
15Steven Gish examines the case of Amy Biehl, the way it was dealt with during the hearing of the TRC and the conclusion the Commission reached. He particularly pinpoints, through a thorough analysis of the public reception of the case, the contradictory reactions to the debate, which leads him to analyse the inner divisions within South African society. He particularly enhances the tensions raised in South Africa by the forgiving attitude of the parents of the victim, who, being Americans, were seen as foreigners who could not understand the country’s situation, an opinion implying that South African parents would not have forgiven the murderers. Forgiving and healing is a complex matter and the numerous debates fuelled by the Amy Biehl case are an important landmark in the restructuring process in South Africa.
16Elaine Kennedy-Dubourdieu analyses the impact of the way the TRC was examined and reported by the press. She focuses on South African journalist Antjie Krog’s appraised book Country of my Skull and analyses how it created a new kind of historical writing based on the combination of a journalist’s work and of a poet’s perception of life. In an interview of the author, Elaine Kennedy-Dubourdieu examines the legacy of the TRC and studies the way Antjie Krog ‘translated’ the South African past for Afrikaners, a process which turned her into either a traitor or a healer for her community. The painful transition from apartheid to democracy is here analysed through the mediation of an author who in her own words uses ‘fictional elements combined with factual information and elements’, enabling more people to understand the issues of the TRC than would a mere newspaper article. Facts and fiction are part of the South African healing process.
17The fourth section of this volume precisely takes up this theme of the writing of history and of the legacy and accounts left for future generations. Since the 1990s new history projects were launched to enable South Africans to have access to an unbiased representation of the country’s history. The commemoration of historical events was revisited, new school text books for history classes were published, new historical perspectives were discussed in the academic field... The idea of defining a new South African cultural identity was often met with resistance, on the basis that the ‘rainbow nation’ was composed of several identities whose diversity defied any satisfying process of unification. The articles in this section focus on the idea that identity is based on education and upbringing and that departing from that is difficult, though not impossible.
18Sheila Collingwood-Whittick examines how Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee explores his own Afrikaner identity in Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. Neither a full-fledged autobiography nor a purely fictional work, the book creates ambiguities which have puzzled many a literary critic. The author of the article argues that the elements chosen by Coetzee and included in his book, whether they are genuinely autobiographical or not, demonstrate the fact that he is conditioned by his cultural background despite his conflictual relationship with his community, that the wounds of apartheid are multifold and that the victims of that system are not just those that are generally recognized as such. In many ways, coming to terms with his own past allows Coetzee to help a lot of Afrikaners to reflect on their own background. Once again the story of the individual is closely connected to the history of the group. The wounds of one person echo the collective wounds, transcending the obvious idiosyncrasies of individual experience.
19The cultural changes that were meant to unite were sometimes sources of division, as shown by Elwyn Jenkins. He tackles the problem raised by the geographical renaming that has taken place in post Apartheid South Africa. If numerous fields are affected by the change of names, history is particularly targeted by officials who for some time have had no concern for the people’s sensitivity. Jenkins demonstrates that most name changing is of no consequence to the residents as they are motivated by spelling inconsistencies, or for very local reasons (for instance, the renaming of a post office). As acknowledged by the United Nations (since the process of changing names occurs on a world scale though for extremely diverse reasons), names possibly offensive to some people are often replaced. Both the symbolic and the historical dimension of names are to be considered; hence, for instance, the heated debates around the names of the architects of apartheid and their replacement by African names for examples. This transitional process can heal wounds but it is a matter for the South African government that it does not open new ones.
20The Afrikaners are a group that evolved greatly in two decades. From the state of emergency in the 1980’s, to the present day, going through a painful process of democratisation, they have constantly been challenging their own identity, redefining it regularly. Wessel Visser examines this process through three specific issues: the attitude of Afrikaners in a post apartheid South Africa, the debate around Afrikaans, and the debate around Bok van Berk’s popular song General De la Rey. Through these aspects Visser demonstrates that Afrikaner identity is in a ‘state of flux’ and is being shaped by Afrikaners in South Africa, but also by a diaspora which has migrated to White Protestant dominated countries who see things differently. A new generation of Afrikaners, devoid of the guilt of their parents, want to create a positive cultural identity and actively participate in the healing of the wounds of their community by insisting on the positive legacy of their ancestors and putting forward the pride of being Afrikaners. New values are thus being elaborated.
21This future-oriented conception of identity is shared by many South Africans. From this point of view, healing the wounds of the past can also be perceived as a way of preparing for the future. This is why the question raised by the last section of this volume is the development of education and social welfare–particularly regarding children–as factors which can contribute to elaborating South Africa’s new identity. These intertwined questions seem all the more relevant to the notion of healing as one of the most symbolical icons of the struggle against apartheid is to be found in the Soweto riots, which were precisely caused by a conflict over education.
22This section opens on Jeanette Schmid’s analysis of the evolution of child welfare policies in post-apartheid South Africa. A social worker with a wide-ranging, international experience, Schmid examines what she calls the ‘crisis’ in child welfare, and tries to pinpoint the various transformations which have altered the sector since 1994. She shows that approaches to child welfare have become more family-centered and community-based, because ‘healing had to occur on both a structural and a practice level’. But one of the main challenges has been, and still is, to design a system which can both take into account and address the specificities of the South African situation because, she argues, importing ‘first-world’ models cannot satisfactorily heal wounds which were inherited from apartheid and are therefore so specifically South African. Ultimately, Schmid pleads for what she calls ‘a change in philosophy’, to avoid replicating the injuries of the past instead of healing them.
23Carol Serrurier-Zucker’s conclusions seem to be rather more optimistic. Her article explores how the South African education system has been trying to heal the wounds of the past. The first step is a close analysis of the various changes undergone by the education system in the last decades and of the underlying challenges faced by all the actors in the field of education; among them, the huge task of having to deal with the structural and ideological legacies of apartheid, but also with very concrete and complex issues, like the problem of languages. Serrurier-Zucker shows that the difficulties were reinforced by the wider context: such diverse problems as the lack of adult education, hatred, racism, sexual violence and discrimination, the AIDS pandemic or the enormous differences in school amenities and resources all impacted, and are still impacting, the education system’s efforts to heal the wounds of the past. In spite of this, Serrurier-Zucker remains optimistic as to the system’s capacity to heal its wounds and ‘to overcome its many difficulties’.
24Cécile Perrot’s article also takes up the issue of education, focusing on higher education development. Her article exposes the philosophy underlying the efforts at reforming the system, namely, a clear focus on ‘equity, democracy, effectiveness and development’. But, she argues, such principles were too general to be of concrete use, and the question of how they should be applied remained unclear. Theory and practice were therefore two different matters. Perrot detects a radical change in higher education policies, a change which occurred in 1999, when Kader Asmal was appointed as Minister of Education, and which was linked to the beginning of Thabo Mbeki’s presidency. Perrot explains that the break from previous healing procedures was caused by the conjunction of Asmal’s rather authoritarian personality and Mbeki’s insistence on modernity, as opposed to Mandela’s emphasis on reconciliation. She exposes how these two factors led to a radical restructuring of the higher education system through an impressive series of mergers which were not unanimously welcome–far from it. These changes, and the way they were implemented, reflect a more general change in the nature of the state, she argues, ‘from a policy of consensus to a policy of imposition’. The healing process is far from over, and ‘ultimately the problem revolves around a question of political and racial identity’.
25This last points suggests that the question raised by this volume, namely, the healing of South African wounds, will long remain unanswered, as the political and racial fault lines which have been created not only by apartheid, but by a far longer history, cannot be bridged easily. As a concluding remark, it might therefore not be useless to emphasize that the notion of healing is two-dimensional: healing designates both a process and its result. In one way or another, all the articles in this collection show that as a process healing is largely under way in South Africa, but as a result it seems far more elusive a goal.
Notes de bas de page
1 The speech is available on the ANC website: www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/ history/mbeki/1996/sp960508.html
Auteurs
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Gilles Teulié
University of Aix-Marseille
Is Professor of British and Commonwealth Studies at the University of Aix-Marseille. He has written extensively on South African history and the Victorian period. He published a book on the Afrikaners and the South African War (Montpellier University Press, 2000). He was the editor of several volumes of essays: ‘Writing History in South Africa’, (University of Bayreuth Press, 2003), ‘Religious Writings and War’ (Montpellier University Press, 2006), ‘Victorian Representations of War’ (international journal Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens no 66 October 2007), and a forthcoming one on War Sermons. -
Mélanie Joseph-Vilain
University of Dijon
Is Senior Lecturer at the University of Dijon (Université de Bourgogne). She read English at Aix-Marseille I, where she defended a doctoral thesis on ‘ (Af)filiation and Writing in Five Novels by André Brink: Looking on Darkness, Rumours of Rain, An Act of Terror, Imaginings of Sand and Devil’s Valley’ in 2003. Her main fields of interest are African literature (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria), contemporary British literature and translation.
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