ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1990s, when South Africa became a democracy, the country has
been in the throes of addressing apartheid’s legacy, as well as longer legacies of
colonialism.1 These efforts at reconstituting and reconfiguring a new society have
occurred across a wide range of institutions and initiatives, some of which have
been created by the resources of the state, while others have emerged out of the
energies and imaginings of civil society. The Truth and Reconciliation Commis-
sion (TRC) was one such project, a product of political compromise, which
attempted to establish ‘the truth’ of apartheid’s gross violations of human rights,
as well as to promote reconciliation of apartheid’s ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’. In
the process of creating an ‘official history’ of apartheid, the TRC attempted to
establish
The TRC also saw that the creation of an electronic monument to apartheid’s
past, a grand spectacle through which South Africa’s ‘real history’, live and
visual, and seeking to recover the past, was anchored into homes, and public
and private interior spaces in different corners of South Africa. In televised
lessons of the past, broadcast to the nation, apartheid’s hidden history was
simultaneously revealed and revised as an essential ‘building block’ for the new
nation.
