In this, the second series of Reflexions: Reading in the present tense, Ingrid de Kok and Mark Heywood continue to invite established and younger writers and other creative artists to reflect on a text that moved them, intellectually engaged them, frightened them or made them laugh. Our reviewer today is Jacob Dlamini who considers Ghosts of Archive: Deconstructive Intersectionality and Praxis
by Verne Harris.
In one of his popular essays, Verne Harris tells the story of a former activist-turned-government functionary who, upon seeing the ghosts that live in the apartheid security archive, remarked of the old order: “They should have destroyed more.” This was in the early days of South Africa’s transition to democracy, and Harris and the bureaucrat were part of a team given the unenviable job of going through the remnants of the apartheid security archive and figuring out what to do with it. But after seeing the ghosts meaning the accounts of intimate betrayal, the
The death of Nelson Mandela, at age 95 on 5 December 2013, brings genuine sadness. As his health deteriorated over the past six months, many asked the more durable question:
how did he change South Africa
? Given how unsatisfactory life is for so many in society, the follow-up question is,
how much room was there for Mandela to maneuver
? South Africa now lurches from crisis to crisis, and so many of us are tempted to remember the Mandela years – especially the first democratic government – as fundamentally different from the crony-capitalist, corruption-riddled, brutally-securitised, eco-destructive and anti-egalitarian regime we suffer now. But were the seeds of our present political weeds sown earlier?