Conditional Tense: Memory and Vocabulary after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (The Africa List)

When apartheid ended in 1994, a radiant optimism suggested a bright future for the new, unified South Africa. But today, even in the midst of a vibrant economy, the cumulative effect of the country’s corrosive past—three hundred years of colonialism, the Anglo-Boer War, the displacement, dispossession, and disenfranchisement of millions of people, and the ravages of racism and capitalist exploitation—continues to eat away at what Desmond Tutu admiringly called “the Rainbow Nation.”

Using the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as starting point, acclaimed writer Antjie Krog’s essays explore texts from every corner of South Africa in an attempt to remap the borders of her country’s communities. In these pages, texts from black women, Afrikaner men, and comic strips are discussed alongside ideas from African philosophers, an archbishop, and a Nobel Prize winner. Through this extraordinary marriage of academic observation and poetic intervention, Krog endeavors to move South Africa beyond the present moment and toward a vocabulary of grace and care.