‘Brothers And Sisters, Do Not Be Afraid Of Me'

In recent years, South Africa has been busy with the historiographical work of producing, interpreting and circulating traumatic memories of apartheid. With the inception of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), ‘storytelling’ arrived as a privileged mode of publicly communicating painful experiences of apartheid. Part psychotherapy, part legal testimony and part historiography, ‘telling your story’ has become a powerful, if ambivalent, way to contribute to a new history of the old South Africa. ¹ South Africa since the TRC has been a space infused with an attention to trauma. Trauma is what the TRC commissioners wanted to hear about, what the media wanted to portray, what researchers wanted to document and understand, what the government wanted to harness and what some, though not all, victims wanted to talk about. As Paul Antze and Michael Lambek have recently noted of the contemporary moment more generally, in South Africa, ‘increasingly, memory worth talking about—worth remembering—is memory of trauma’. ²