Introduction

I first met Yvonne Khutwane, a long-time community activist and prominent victim of political violence, in February 2000 in the small rural township of Zwelethemba, an hour and a half outside of Cape Town. I was in South Africa to begin ethnographic research on the ways South Africans were using storytelling about apartheid-era violence as a path to personal and political healing in a country that was still very much in transition out of its painful past. Yvonne had first told her traumatic story publically a few years prior to my visit, at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC was set up by the new, democratically elected government to unearth and make public the crimes of the apartheid past. In the intervening years, she had also told her story to numerous journalists and filmmakers and had participated in frequent interviews with anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists from South Africa and abroad.