" This will help in healing our land": remembering and forgetting Quatro in post-Apartheid South Africa
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Date
2012-06
Authors
Kaden, Robert
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Faculty of the Humanities, University of the Free State
Abstract
This article employs the history of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK)’s 1980s prison camp, Quatro, as a case
study to broadly explore the political jockeying over the memory of anti-apartheid prison camps (as
sites of human rights abuses) in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. This is done by tracing how
the collective memory of Quatro had been received and interpreted by different political groups and the
media in post-apartheid South Africa. This article proposes that, with regard to the collective memory
of Quatro, two diverging streams of memory politics co-exist in post-apartheid South Africa: one
that chooses to remember, and one that chooses to forget. Both these streams reinforce the “Rainbow
Nation” mentalité or the myth of the “new South Africa”, albeit in different ways. Opposition groups
like the former National Party (NP) and the Democratic Alliance (DA) have frequently drawn on the
collective memory of Quatro as a way of challenging the ruling African National Congress (ANC)’s
hegemonic position. Much of this is framed in the context of the democratic rhetoric of post-apartheid
South Africa. The ruling ANC, on the other hand, has negated the ambiguous narrative and traumatic
memory of Quatro in order to write a “shared history” of the past that can foster a “new South Africa”.
Description
Keywords
African National Congress (ANC), Angola, Democratic Alliance (DA), L’histoire de mentalities, Memory, Post-apartheid South Africa, Quatro, Rainbow nation, Trauma, Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK)
Citation
Kaden, R. (2012). " This will help in healing our land": remembering and forgetting Quatro in post-Apartheid South Africa. Journal for Contemporary History, 37(1), 101-122.