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‘I Was Those Thousands!’: Memory, Identity and Space in John Kani's Nothing But the Truth1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2007

SHANE GRAHAM
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Abstract

John Kani's Nothing But the Truth (2002) dramatizes South Africa's collective confrontation with its traumatic past – played out on the public stage most visibly in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings – through the personal situation of Sipho Makhaya and his family. This essay analyses the obstacles Sipho and his daughter face in their attempts to negotiate new identities within the shifting social and physical geographies of post-apartheid South Africa. Identities in the apartheid era were rooted in specific places and socio-spatial configurations that are now being radically and rapidly transformed; Kani's play implies that this transitional moment in the country's history provides the opportunity to rewrite the codes that determine the ways that space is produced and used, and in the process to alter the ways that people form identities and memories in relation to both social space and other people.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 68 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2006

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References

NOTES

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9 Other notable plays include He Went Quietly by Yael Farber and Duma Khumalo, one of the Khulumani actors from The Story; Pieter-Dirk Uys's satirical piece Truth Omissions; and Antjie Krog's trilingual Waarom is Dié wat Vóór Toyi-Toyi Altyd So Vet? (‘Why are the Women Who Dance the Toyi-Toyi Always So Fat?’).

10 Pigou, Piers, ‘False Promises and Wasted Opportunities? Inside South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in Posel, Deborah and Simpson, Graeme, eds., Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002), pp. 37–65, here p. 60Google Scholar.

11 I develop this argument in some detail elsewhere: Graham, Shane, ‘The Truth Commission and Post-Apartheid Literature in South Africa’, Research in African Literatures, 34, 1 (2003), pp. 11–30Google Scholar.

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14 For my analysis of Ubu see Graham, ‘The Truth Commission’, pp. 16–21. My take on The Bells of Amersfoort will appear in a forthcoming collection on the works Zakes Mda edited by David Bell and J. U. Jacobs.

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16 Mary Jordan, ‘A Deeply Moving Drama of Loss and Reconciliation’ (Review of Nothing But the Truth), in Business Day, 2 October 2002, available at http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=619638 (last accessed 3 Nov. 2006).

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19 See Posel, who argues that ‘a fundamental source of the unresolved division over the meaning of apartheid was the divergent class interests accommodated within the Afrikaner nationalist alliance’ before 1948. Deborah Posel, ‘The Meaning of Apartheid Before 1948: Conflicting Interests and Forces Within the Afrikaner Nationalist Alliance’, in Beinart, William and Dubow, Saul, eds., Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 206–230, here p. 220Google Scholar.

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24 Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995, preamble, available at http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/legal/act9534.htm (last accessed 3 Nov. 2006).

25 Some of the most incisive critiques of the Amnesty Commission's procedures and premises have come from Mahmood Mamdani, who asks, ‘If truth has replaced justice has reconciliation turned into an embrace of evil?’ Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Reconciliation without Justice’ (Review of Reconciliation through Truth and The Healing of a Nation?), in Southern African Review of Books (November/December 1996), p. 3. Elsewhere he laments that the ‘truth’ about the past as exposed by the TRC was too narrow: it ‘focused on torture, murder and rape, ignoring everything that was distinctive about apartheid and its machinery of violence’. Idem, ‘A Diminished Truth’, in James, Wilmot and Vijver, Linda Van de, eds., After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (Athens, OH and Cape Town: Ohio University Press and David Philip, 2000), pp. 58–61, here p. 60Google Scholar. See also Colin Bundy, ‘The Beast of the Past: History and the TRC’, in James and Van de Vijver, After the TRC; pp. 9–20, Madeleine Fullard and Nicky Rousseau, ‘Truth, Evidence and History: A Critical Review of Aspects of the Amnesty Process’, in Villa-Vicencio and Doxtader, The Provocations of Amnesty, pp. 195–216; and Jeffery, Anthea, The Truth about the Truth Commission (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1999)Google Scholar.

26 For various arguments in defense of the TRC process see Verwoerd, Wilhelm, ‘Towards the Recognition of Our Past Injustices’, in Villa-Vicencio, Charles and Verwoerd, Wilhelm, eds., Looking Back Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (Cape Town/London: UCT Press/Zed Books, 2000), pp. 155–165, here pp. 159–60Google Scholar; Fullard and Rousseau, ‘Truth, Evidence and History’, p. 196; Ronald Slye, ‘Amnesty, Truth, and Reconciliation: Reflections on the South African Amnesty Process’, in Rotberg, Robert and Thompson, Dennis, eds., Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), pp. 170–188CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 170; Deborah Posel and Graeme Simpson, ‘The Power of Truth: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Context’, in Posel and Simpson, eds., Commissioning the Past; pp. 1–13, and Albie Sachs, ‘His Name Was Henry’, in James and Van de Vijver, After the TRC pp. 94–100.

27 André du Toit, ‘The Moral Foundations of the South African TRC: Truth as Acknowledgement and Justice as Recognition’, in Rotberg and Thompson, Truth v. Justice, pp. 122–140, here p. 135.

28 Martha Minow, ‘The Hope for Healing: What Can Truth Commissions Do?’, in Rotberg and Thompson, Truth v. Justice, pp. 235 – 260, here p. 240. See also Gibson, James L., Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2004), p. 22Google Scholar.

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33 Graeme Simpson, ‘Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories: A Brief Evaluation of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in Posel and Simpson, Commissioning the Past, pp. 220–251, here p. 238.

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36 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 219.

37 Eng, David and Kazanjian, David, ‘Introduction: Mourning Remains’, in Eng, David and Kazanjian, David, eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: UP of California, 2003), pp. 1–25, here p. 5Google Scholar.

38 Klopper, Dirk, ‘Narrative Time and the Space of the Image: The Truth of the Lie in Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's Testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in Kock, Leon de, Bethlehem, Louise and Laden, Sonja, eds., South Africa in the Global Imaginary (Pretoria and Leiden: UNISA Press and Brill, 2004), pp. 195–213, here p. 203CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Mark Sanders, ‘Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in Eng and Kazanjian, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, pp. 77–98, here p. 82.

40 Almost as if taking up the challenge posed by Kani's play, South Africa's king of the theatre box office, Mbongeni Ngema, and a group of investors are planning to open a chain of cinemas in townships throughout the country. This is the first such effort in the post-apartheid era, and is designed to lure black movie-goers back from the urban and suburban cinemas and to create a larger black viewership for local and international films. Such an effort, like Sipho's determination to start a library in New Brighton, challenges the assumptions that formed the basis for apartheid spatial regimentation and the institutionally barren townships that resulted.

41 Jeremy Cronin, ‘Tutu's Report Tells the Truth, but not the Whole Truth’, Sunday Independent, 15 November 1998, available at www.bard.edu/hrp/resource_pdfs/cronin.tutu.pdf (last accessed 3 Nov. 2006).

42 Mamdani, ‘Reconciliation Without Justice’, p. 3.