ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on traumatic memories, and the psychotherapeutic discourse. It examines formal, written historical accounts as well as more generalized cultural strategies for representing the past, through storytelling sessions, museum tours and interviews with individual South Africans. South Africa has been busy with the historiographical work of producing, interpreting and circulating traumatic memories of apartheid. Traumatic memory is, of course, the most appropriate source of memory for a history defined by its traumatic secrets. In a therapeutic historiography, the key events of history are portrayed as a series of traumatic events, tempered by moments of relative, unimportant calm. Khulumani's history may be framed as a traumatic history, but the group objects to participating in a history-writing effort that is supposed to heal and reconcile the entire nation on the backs of the memorial/therapeutic work of its victims.
