Chapter One INTRODUCTION
1.7 Broad theoretical issues
instance, that the causation of the civil war could be attributed not just to political partisanship, but also to earlier displacement/settlement practices under the apartheid regime. The tenant-labour laws of the 1960s for example, resulted in families from white-owned farms moving into areas under Amakhosi of perhaps related clans, living nearer places of work in cities. Generational tensions arose and younger and older men became aligned in groups during the state of emergency of the 1980s. I argue for a dimension of such clashes that is more than political preferences but also generational frustrations.
Another void in the existing literature is the theme of memory and trauma. Most studies explore and record the interviews of survivors describing what happened, but this thesis takes the matter further by exploring the link between history and memory.
I believe that history is what happened and memory is how we remember what happened. This thesis will look into the history of what happened in KwaShange and the history of the manner in which people remember what happened in KwaShange and of how these memories have affected them since then. People are better able to remember an event if they have an opportunity to tell others about it. 135
regard in that they give a vivid method of understanding oral sources testimonies and their memories.
As Gary Baines pointed out, memory, like history, is a reconstruction of the past from which meaning is derived. He states, however, that “history and memory are not synonymous.”142 Baines refer to Pierre Nora’s view of memory that it “is in a permanent state of flux, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation.” He argues that there is a tension between history and memory, “[…], history and memory are in a fundamental state of tension. The tension is between the past [which is gone] and the history [which we construct today].”143 Memory is the link between the two (we remember the past and our memories become history). Baines see no need for the tension between the two.
He reasons:
History and memory are often in contestation but they need not be. Indeed, there can be intersection or elision between history and memory for they are mutually constitutive. So the juxtaposition of history and memory is something of a false dichotomy to start with. What we are actually interested in is memory in history, the role of the past in history or, for that matter, in contemporary politics.144
Remember: Memory Work and Resilience in Times of AIDS (Pietermaritzburg, Cluster Publications, 2006) gives overview on the theory of memory. See also Philippe Denis, “Introduction”, in P. Denis and R. Ntsimane, eds., Oral History in a Wounded Country; Interactive Interviewing in South Africa (Scottsville: UKZN Press, 2009).
139See for an example, Paul Thompson, The Voices of the Past: Oral History, 3rd ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000).
140Sean Field, “Beyond ‘Healing’: Trauma, Oral History and Regeneration”, Oral History 34:1 (2006), 31-42.
141Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).
142 Gary Baines, “The Politics of Public History in Post-Apartheid South Africa” (Rhodes University, 2004), this article can be access online:
http://sun025.su.ac.za/portal/page/portal/arts/department1/geskiedenis/docs/baines-g.pdf - accessed on 11 July 2012.
143 Gary Baines, “The Politics of Public History in Post-Apartheid South Africa” (Rhodes University, 2004) , this article can be access online:
http://sun025.su.ac.za/portal/page/portal/arts/department1/geskiedenis/docs/baines-g.pdf - accessed on 11 July 2012.
144Gary Baines, “The Politics of Public History in Post-Apartheid South Africa” (Rhodes University, 2004), p. 5 this article can be access online:
http://sun025.su.ac.za/portal/page/portal/arts/department1/geskiedenis/docs/baines-g.pdf - accessed on 11 July 2012.
Portelli says that “the content of the written source is independent of the researcher’s need and hypothesis; it is a stable text, which we can only interpret.”145 The interpretation, however, in this case belongs to me as historian. The memories which I use are now texts and reconstructions, reproduced in my text; “from an epistemological perspective, they are subjective reconstructions.”146 Borrowing from Portelli’s thesis, my intention in here is not only to give information about the events of the past but to describe what the significance of these [political violence] events was and still is for the survivors and perpetrators of the violence in KwaShange and secondarily, for the production of scientific knowledge.147 In other words, memories are primarily significant for the people who remember and only secondarily for scholars. In this study, I am interested in the memories of a place (KwaShange).
Whilst I am looking for facts and the truth (even though these concepts are contested) about the past in oral history, one could note that truth is a problem whether one uses oral history or written sources. Portelli says:
If you are only seeking verifiable factual evidence, then memories presented through oral histories will sometimes give you facts and at other times they will not. But if you are trying to understand how and why people believe what they believe, think what they think and – most crucially – why people act in the way that they do, their memories and oral narratives or text are of vital research significance.148
Portelli also warns that approaching oral history and memory in a positivist or artifactual manner runs the risk of excluding a wealth of information which is deemed emotional, subjective, nostalgic or immeasurable, and therefore not worthy of study.
Research practices that flow from these assumptions are disempowering, and it is unfortunate that these attitudes still drive much academic research.149
145Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different?”, quoted in Outi Fingeroos, “Karelia: A Place of Memories and Utopias”, Oral Tradition, 23/2 (2008): 235-254.
146 Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different?”, quoted in Outi Fingeroos, “Karelia: A Place of Memories and Utopias”, Oral Tradition, 23/2 (2008): 235-254.
147Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different?”, quoted in Outi Fingeroos, “Karelia: A Place of Memories and Utopias”, Oral Tradition, 23/2 (2008): 235-254.
148Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different?”, in R. Perks and A. Thomson eds., The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge, 1998), 67, 70.
149Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) quoted in Sean Field, R. Mayer and F.
Many of my interviewees came from KwaShange and interviews were conducted in KwaShange where, many years before, they had experienced this turmoil. The place of KwaShange is significant for the interviewees. Christopher Tilley argues that place is a socially constructed expression that is an integrated part of people’s everyday life.150
The interpretation of place includes both subjective and social dimensions, and place cannot be understood without them. In other words, the nature of place depends on the person who experiences it and the way he or she experiences it; a place does not exist without relations and is essentially restricted by the human vision and consciousness. In this thesis, place is understood as a construction that individuals and communities produce through speech and writing and creation of space.151
Nora explains the mechanisms through which the meanings of a phenomenon from the past – such as a place of memory – are recreated. 152 Nora’s Realms of Memory falls into the genre of history of mentalities, which focuses not on war and politics, as is usual in earlier history-writing, but on the wider world-views of past cultural and social groups. He characterizes his approach as a “history of the second degree.” He defines it as “a history in multiple voices … less interested in causes than in effects
…less interested in ‘what actually happened’ than in its perpetual re-use and misuse, its influence on successive presents; less interested in traditions than in the way in which traditions are constituted and passed on.”153 Relying on Nora, my study will
Swason eds., “Introduction”, in Imagining the City: Memories and Cultures in Cape Town (Cape Town: Human Science Research Council Press, 2007), 9.
150 Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments quoted in in Outi Fingeroos, “Karelia: A Place of Memories and Utopias”, Oral Tradition, 23/2 (2008): 235-254.
151 Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments quoted in in Outi Fingeroos, “Karelia: A Place of Memories and Utopias”, Oral Tradition, 23/2 (2008): 235-254.
152Pierre Nora, Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) quoted in in Outi Fingeroos, “Karelia: A Place of Memories and Utopias”, Oral Tradition, 23/2 (2008):
235-254. See also Pierre Nora, “The Era of Commemoration”, in L. D. Kritzman, ed., Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Volume III: Symbols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 609-37. Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History”, in L. D.
Kritzman, ed., Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Volume 1: Conflicts and Division (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1-20.
153Pierre Nora, Remembered Realms: Pierre Nora and French National Memory from www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/106.3
document how people remember the traumatic events of the political unrest in KwaShange, i.e. the history of what happened in KwaShange.
Theories of memory are especially pertinent to the study of trauma. Evidence from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work has an immediacy that could be missing from such reworked redemptive and master-narrative ‘constructions,’ as I have mentioned above in my literature review. Readings in trauma and memory are especially important to my study which considers the nature of memory and the nature of healing. Phyllis Kosminsky, a clinical-psychologist dealing with grief counselling, speaks about the difficulties of healing in what she terms ‘complicated mourning’ situations.154 These are: violence, conflicted feelings or complication in regard to a death. These feelings may result in the inability to get past the ‘block’ to face the inevitability of such a death and therefore an inability to heal naturally.
Healing may take time and movement through the usual sequence of grieving; denial, confrontation of the full range of feelings evoked and eventual acceptance and accommodation of the loss. She says of one of her patients, “People who witness their loved ones die a terrible death are often left with memories so vivid and unremitting that they can think of little else: not the person’s life, not their relationship with the person and all that they shared … This is the nature of traumatic memory – an image that seems to exist apart from time, with the potential to trigger old stores of emotional pain every time the image is recalled.155
Time does not drain these images of their power. Nothing we say to ourselves and nothing anyone else says seems to help … because of the way the brain stores these memories, it can feel as if they are happening right now [her emphasis].156
There is difference between ordinary and painful memory. Being in grief makes people to remember differently. Using the works of Sean Field157 and Kim Lacy
154Phyllis Kosminsky, Getting Back to Life When Grief Won’t Heal (US: McGraw-Hill Books, 2007).
155Phyllis Kosminsky, Getting Back to Life When Grief Won’t Heal (US: McGraw-Hill Books, 2007).
156Phyllis Kosminsky, Getting Back to Life When Grief Won’t Heal (US: McGraw-Hill Books, 2007), 23.
157Sean Field, Lost Communities, Living Memories: Remembering Forced Removals in Cape Town (Cape Town: David Philip, 2001), see also Sean Field, “Remembering Experience, Interpreting Memory: Life Stories from Windermere”, African Studies 60, 1, (2001), 119-133.
Rogers,158 however, I shall restrict my discussion to the issue of painful memories in oral history. I shall not deal with grief per se because I am not equipped for that.
In this dissertation memory is studied as a source of history and, in my last chapter (Chapter Ten), an object of investigation. The question may be asked, how I envisaged the link between history and memory. I would argue that history is a record of what happened and memory is how we remember what happened. This thesis looks into the history of what happened in KwaShange and the manner in which people remember these events and how these memories have affected them since then.
People are better able to remember an event if they have an opportunity to tell others about it.159
All research needs to be grounded experience and information before theorizing can take place. I have realized that historians and social scientists must venture to approach persons from whom they are ordinarily remote because of differences of age, lifestyle or experience, for interviews on sensitive issues, as it is only by doing so that data on matters concealed, or rarely discussed, will be revealed and made usable.
The broader implications of my research are that history will be re-written on the basis of these revelations, and the process of establishing the history of the past by collection of data from oral sources will be validated as a research methodology.
As formal interviews are my primary source, theory around memory and oral history will inform my approach to these interviews. Frisch160 and Portelli161 draw attention to the “theme” and “plot” of oral narratives162; “for all their considerable value, oral history interviews are not an unproblematic source. Although narrators speak for themselves, what they have to say does not.” There are obvious limits to the process of collecting oral history, because people may forget details and reconstitute their
158Kim Lacy Rogers, “Memory, Struggle, and Power: On Interviewing Political Activists”, Oral History Review 15 (Spring 1987), 165-184.
159Philippe Denis, Never Too Small to Remember: Memory Work and Resilience in Times of AIDS (Pietermaritzburg, Cluster Publications, 2006).
160Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).
161Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
162See also, Grele, J. Ronald, “Preface,” Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History 2nd Edition (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985), viii. Hs book deals with the reconstruction of memories in oral history interviews.
tales. In other words, memory is continually being reconstructed. Nevertheless, if interviews are collected within a large group, some consensus should emerge.
This study inserts into scholarship the Zulu perspective on trauma and indigenous methods used to deal with trauma. How do local people define and explain the experiences they went through? How are they dealing with the aftermath of violence?
These are questions that are taken up in this study. Political trauma is not simply a collection of symptoms, as is often claimed163—in fact symptoms may not follow all traumas.164 Trauma associated with political conflict is largely about the destruction of individuals, families and the social and political structures of a society. The theme of psycho-social165 intervention has been explored by Sigmund Freud, who argues that in war people do not “sink so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed”. For Freud, violence is innate in human nature and finds easy expression in times of conflict.166
Goldblatt and Meintjies argue that the violence of South Africa’s past has contributed to a climate of violence against women and crime in the country today.167 According to this view, violence generally continues for decades within the social fabric of societies which have emerged from conflict. Psycho-social studies stress the importance of thinking about trauma from both psychological and social perspectives.
The term ‘psycho-social’ recognises that there is a close, ongoing interaction between an individual’s psychological state and his or her social environment168 Simpson and Rauch of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg169
163See Brandon Hamber, “The Impact of Trauma: A Psychosocial Approach”. Keynote Address to the
“A Shared Practice – Victims Work in Action Conference”, (Limavady: Northern Ireland, 7-8 April 2004).
164Brandon Hamber, “The Impact of Trauma: A Psychosocial Approach”. Keynote Address to the “A Shared Practice – Victims Work in Action Conference”, (Limavady: Northern Ireland, 7-8 April 2004).
165See Radikobo Ntsimane, “Trauma, Resilience and Reconciliation: Sinomlando’ Psycho-Social Interventions in KwaZulu-Natal”, Archives News: National Archives and Records Services of South Africa 1 (2007), 31.
166Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915): The Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol XIV (1914-1916).
http://www.panarchy.org/freud/war.1915.html accessed 14 July 2008.
167B. Goldblatt and S. Meintjies, “Dealing with the Aftermath – Sexual Violence and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, Agenda, 36, (1997), 7-17.
168I. Agger, “Psychosocial Assistance during Ethno-political Warfare in the Former Yugoslavia”, in D.
Chirot and M. Seligman eds., Ethno-political Warfare: Causes, Consequences and Possible Solutions (Washington: American Psychological Association, 2001), 305-318.
169G. Simpson and J. Rauch, “Political Violence 1991”, in N. Boister and K. Ferguson-Brown eds., Human Rights Yearbook (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1991).
have developed a concept of the “politicisation of everyday life,” which can be used in the consideration of the consequences of political violence.
Most discussions of conflict that invoke culture discuss the influence of culture on the course of the conflict itself.170 This study will show a particularly Zulu cultural bias towards conflict, in the form of feuding and physical violence. ‘Culture of conflict’ as used in this thesis refers to the beliefs, attitudes and opinions of particular groups that those who disagree with them politically or on any other major issue are enemies and deserve to be destroyed. Such beliefs understandably influence the historical outcome of any conflict. It is possible to explain the conflict-related aspects of particular cultures as culturally specific, since the belief that conflict should inevitably find expression in violence is not universal.
Despite differences between cultures concerning conflict and culturally specific practices and thought patterns, there are many commonalities in the occurrence of conflict worldwide. In order to contribute to a more universal understanding of the topic, these commonalities may profitably be compared to see if conflict occurs in particular cultures which favour, or ‘naturalise’, conflict as a mode of settling disputes. There is no doubt that there are layers of behaviour and thought processes that form part of a culture of conflict, and these need to be recognized as causes of violent conflict. Most processes intended to resolve conflict, like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), do not deal with the transition from violence to peace as a process of cultural change.171 In KwaShange, there are a number of conflicts that erupted before the political violence of the 1980s. My study will explore how the local people of KwaShange have been dealing with the ‘after the conflict’
years. In other words my study will look at the historical dimension of beliefs and behaviour concerning peace-making after conflict, like prayer-meetings and
170See for instance Michelle LeBaron, “Culture and Conflict”, (UNHCR, July 2003); Michelle LeBaron and Bruce Grundison, Conflict and Culture: Research in Five Communities in British Columbia, Canada (Victoria, British Columbia: University of Victoria, 1993); Edward Hall, Beyond Cultures (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976); John Paul Lederach, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 94.
171There is a lot of literature on this subject, see for example, Radikobo Ntsimane, “A Mirage Called Forgiveness: A Critique of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, in P. Denis ed., Orality, Memory and the Past: Listening to the Voices of Black Clergy under Colonialism and Apartheid (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2000); Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night: A Story of Forgiveness (Cape Town: David Philip, 2003).