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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The Archbishop, the private detective and the angel of history: the production of South African public memory and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Author:Braude, ClaudiaISNI
Year:1996
Periodical:Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa
Volume:8
Issue:2
Pages:39-65
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:offences against human rights
commissions of inquiry
literature
Abstract:The dangers facing the production of postapartheid historical consciousness and knowledge, as epitomized and ritualized by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), is the topic of this paper. One year into the TRC's two-year lifespan, it compares aspects of public memory in popular fiction and ostensibly more historically rigorous modes of writing in the media and the academy. The central question is whether the history produced as new South African history, marked by the fact and ritual of the TRC, will signify a new historical consciousness or be a continuation of the preexisting apartheid history. The fiction analysed in the article are the five detective novels written by Gillian Slovo between 1984 and 1995. The article further analyses the submissions to the TRC by Pik Botha and F.W. De Klerk, and Hermann Gilliomee's view on apartheid history. Bibliogr.
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