PEACEFUL MEMORIES: REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN KANGWANE, SOUTH AFRICA

Abstract

ABSTRACTDespite its manifest, if largely undocumented, histories of menacing violence and perilous politics, the thrust of popular memory in the former apartheid bantustan of KaNgwane insists that it was a peaceful, even apolitical, place. In a contemporary South African memorial culture that idealizes memories of victimization by (and resistance to) apartheid and its political violence, why would some in KaNgwane persistently narrate the past through tropes of peaceful order and disavowals of the political? Are these mnemonic effacements in KaNgwane best conceived of as forms of forgetting? This article challenges such a proposition. First, it recovers the hitherto unrecognized politics and violence in KaNgwane, in part (and paradoxically) out of the very same narratives that deny such histories. Second, it explores the dialectical co-implication of remembering and forgetting, and of memory and history, in KaNgwane's supposed anamnesis. And third, it proposes that the occlusions and assurances of memory in KaNgwane are structured by a localized semiotics in which politics is retrospectively signified by order and restraint, and negated by disorder and revolt. In this ‘memory work’, KaNgwane's past is anaesthetized of violence, and heroism is recovered not from rehearsals of victimization and resistance, but from memories of pacified civility instead.