ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and outlines its particular therapeutic imagination. Then, by looking at attempts at TRC hearings by the African National Congress to begin writing its own history of the South African past, it traces the effects of this therapeutic imperative on what is identified as a new mode of South African historiography. The chapter explores how in this mode of historiography, the various strategies for understanding and representing the past are inspired by recent psychological models of trauma, memory and recovery. It considers the question of why this therapeutic framework seems to be so effective a way for the TRC and the South African government to author(ize) a new history of the old South Africa. The chapter suggests that the therapeutic ethic at the heart of the TRC provides a new avenue for memory's transformation into history.