In the wake of South Africa’s democratic transition, we have witnessed a proliferation of narratives that attempt to highlight the role that ordinary South Africans played in the antiapartheid struggle. Oral histories and memory work have been key to creating these narratives and have formed a crucial part of social history, particularly in its accounts of forced removal and antiapartheid resistance. This overview of four recent works leads us to rethink narratives of resistance and removal and to interrogate the categories and concepts on which they are based.

Pamela Reynold’s War in Worcester examines youth under the apartheid state and the role young people played in bringing an end to oppression. The book examines youths’ refusal to accept the adulthood on offer under apartheid’s political dispensation and takes on the violence of the state, its cruelty, and the intimacies of its warfare. Drawing on the narratives of fourteen young men identified under apartheid as “African” (11), Reynolds bases her study in Zwelethemba, a suburb of Worcester and a “Coloured” labor preference area, and attempts both an ethnography and a critique of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). She reveals how the commission’s victim/perpetrator binary reduced these young activists to the role of “civilians” according to the Geneva Conventions and provided a platform on which they could relate their experiences only as victims. To avoid an ethnography of victimization, Reynolds studies both the TRC and black African activists and draws on versions of the apartheid past that exist beyond both the commission’s hearings and the African National Congress’s (ANC) formal narrative of the liberation struggle.

The idea of war is central to this text. Reynolds discusses how what counts as war also determines who is recognized as a legitimate fighter. While liberation organizations drew on the Geneva Conventions and recognized the antiapartheid struggle as a war, the South African government characterized this resistance as conflict with terrorists. The idea of war extends to how one conceives of children or youth in conflict situations. Reynolds demonstrates how the state under apartheid perceived the black child as unworthy of good governance and as a potential terrorist. Borrowing from Stanley Cavell, Reynolds takes the idea of the child as a necessary and undertheorized figure and asks when a child’s process of political and ethical understanding of the world comes to an end, becomes no longer childlike.

The central themes of War in Worcester include young men’s experiences during the struggle and the TRC’s approach to documenting that struggle, as well as its conceptualization of activism and victimhood. It investigates the triangulation among the commission, the activist, and the state; among the commission, the town of Zwelethemba, and the fourteen young men whose experiences Reynolds documents; and among the group, community, and individual. Through this ethnography, Reynolds grapples with the question of what it means to do research on youth in conflict and to study the young who engage in a fight voluntarily and without conscription. War in Worcester presents the record of struggle in a small town and a description of relationships among young men who examine their experiences of activism retrospectively and microscopically.

The most compelling part of the analysis comes in chapter 2, where Reynolds examines the idea of “bearable” and “unbearable” suffering. Here she looks at the modes of suffering experienced by the young who sought to make the country ungovernable and who as a result survived the state’s brutal retaliation. Using the narratives of youth who did not identify themselves as activists, and were not represented as such by the TRC’s Human Rights Violation Committee (HRVC), Reynolds analyzes how the state’s retaliation took two forms: gathering information about local leaders of the youth, and sowing uncertainty among the majority of the young by carrying out arbitrary and brutal acts. Youths in Zwelethemba who challenged the state had to withstand pain and fear across time and space where the everyday and the extraordinary folded into one another. Acts of state brutality were both public and private, with bodies marked by the loss of an eye or limb, as if to serve as a warning to potential “terrorists.” Such acts of physical torture created varying degrees of suffering, unbearable or bearable as the young developed tactics and ethics by which to resist and to master the pain.

Narratives of resistance and pain are also central to Dawne Y. Curry’s Apartheid on a Black Isle, which attempts to highlight Alexandra’s multifaceted and inventive opposition to apartheid in the 1970s. Drawing on oral histories and court documents, Curry rethinks resistance in ways that expand the existing historiography—examining not only Alexandra’s participation in the underground antiapartheid movement and student uprising, but also the environmental destruction that intensified township residents’ opposition to the state. Apartheid on a Black Isle also challenges the premise that resistance was characterized only by visible and conventional forms of protest. Instead, Curry demonstrates how Alexandra formed a major hub of clandestine activity, with residents dividing the township into streets and using their enclosed spaces to form “micro” sites of resistance. Configuring their insulated geographical landscape to their advantage, Alexandrans also put their bodies and the media to use in resisting apartheid’s intrusion into their daily lives.

Attempting to shift the focus from leaders and liberation organizations to those intimately affected by the removal process, Apartheid on a Black Isle offers a “history from below” (7). Curry writes that to understand the many forms of resistance, one must hear the voices of ordinary Alexandrans. Drawing on the work of Mike Sarakinsky (Reference Sarakinsky1984) and Phillip Bonner and Noor Nieftagodien (Reference Bonner and Nieftagodien2008), she interprets the forced removals through the lenses of gender, space, and ageism to see afresh Alexandra’s contribution to the student uprising and intragender politics. Focusing on forced removal, the underground movement, and student protest, Curry highlights how public and private defiance meshed in Alexandra to form interwoven patterns of resistance. During the student uprising one such strategy against the structures of apartheid was systematic destruction: setting buildings on fire, confiscating merchandise from “Indian”- and “Chinese”-owned shops, and hijacking township buses.

In chapter 5 Curry shows how Alexandrans memorialized apartheid and its inhumane effects by creating new traditions of mourning and remembrance. Drawing on the Cillié Commission report (South Africa Commission of Inquiry 1980), the official inquiry into the Soweto uprising, but offering an alternative analysis, she examines how survivors marked the death of loved ones. Instead of using scientific terminology, residents created their own language of mourning by painting oral canvases that framed death and their remembrance of it. Residents used the morgue, the streets, the police station, and even neighboring countries to reflect on and to carry out activities associated with death during apartheid, such as retrieving bodies and uncovering information about loved ones—acts that Curry calls “reclamation” (15).

Curry draws particular attention to the underappreciated role that women played in the student uprising. They not only led and performed acts of reclamation, but also challenged the authority of judicial laws and refused to accept the state’s language to define or constrain their emotional response. While apartheid officials intruded into and policed every aspect of their inner and public lives, the women of Alexandra talked about how loved ones died, creating an alternative obituary. They also circumvented government restrictions by conducting visually impressive funerals. As scripted and dramatized theatrical events, these funerals symbolized at once the nation’s freedom and the deceased’s spiritual liberation. When Alexandra’s women and other survivors could celebrate, they honored those deceased with tombstones, wreaths, or prayer vigils. However, when authorities prohibited these activities, they internalized their pain. Insomnia, hypertension, and heart ailments often crippled these women, and instead of wreaths or flowers, commemoration appeared in the form of their own physical suffering. Curry suggests that these women’s bodies serve as a network, an entwining of individual stories into a holistic history of Africans across time and place, from one locale to another.

Similarly, Lauretta Ngcobo’s Prodigal Daughters collects stories drawn from South African women who lived or were born in exile during the apartheid years. These stories tell of the harsh realities faced by women in exile and reflect on a set of experiences no longer shared within South Africa. These vivid and authentic recollections of life lived away from family and community depict dislocation from the certainty of place and belonging. Common to these narratives are issues of identity, acceptance or rejection in host countries, childbearing, and motherhood and child-rearing, as well as the recognition that apartheid was but one form of oppression in the world. Under difficult circumstances these women constantly negotiated their roles as wives, mothers, sisters, activists, and friends.

Ngcobo suggests that while some may consider these narratives of exile irrelevant in a “free and democratic nation that is almost twenty years old” (7), they are essential to understanding South Africa’s turbulent history and recent past. Drawing on her own memories and the experiences of women such as Baleka Mbete, former presenter of the ANC’s Radio Freedom and Speaker of Parliament, she argues that South Africa has yet to fully appreciate the memories and records of life in exile.

Ngcobo refers to the sexual abuse of women in exile at the hand of ANC leadership, but discusses it no further. Instead, she emphasizes “other abuses of equality,” like the special privileges that white South African women often enjoyed (7). This inattention to sexual abuse in the ANC’s exile camps is an example of the deflection and silencing of painful memories, the sort of (dis)engagement with memory that Sean Field addresses in Oral History, Community and Displacement. Grappling with memories of forced removals in postapartheid South Africa, Field studies oral histories to understand how people remember, forget, or silence their recollections of forced displacement. He focuses on people’s sense of community and place in Cape Town and their experiences before, during, and after forced removal. Field aims to develop antiessentialist arguments about the construction of self and identity, while highlighting the “fragile subjectivity of real selves” under an oppressive regime (2). Both memory and imagination are key to how people shape their feelings about themselves and their pasts in order to form a cohesive sense of self. Imaginative compositions coalesced into what are commonly called “memories” constitute how people recall, forget, and hide mental traces. This conscious and unconscious framing of the self through imagination and memory is thus central to Field’s analysis of the historical and emotional weight of forced removals and their postapartheid legacies.

Oral History, Community and Displacement asks two main questions: in oral histories, how does memory shape the telling of stories? And, what history can be constructed through the memories of individuals and communities forcibly displaced in Cape Town? Field draws on archival and literary sources and as well as extensive oral history research. Tracking people’s diverse memories of apartheid and community displacement, as well as the postapartheid heritage and public history initiatives, he presents histories of communities in Cape Town such as Windermere, Kensington, Gugulethu, Langa, and District Six. Provocatively, Field challenges the notion that all experiences of forced displacement were traumatic and suggests that we think critically (and psychoanalytically) about “collective trauma” in order to grasp the intersubjective elements at the heart of oral history and memory work in the South African context (12).

Although the overall focus of the book is on black and Coloured communities of Cape Town, in chapter 8 Field analyzes oral histories of Rwandan refugees, their experiences of genocide and their survival during the South African xenophobic crisis of 2008. He examines the threats posed to their memory and the mental images of violence that disrupt their remembrance. Field suggests that the recurrence of violent images of the genocide within the minds of Rwandan refugees, who daily must navigate how they are seen and not seen in postapartheid Cape Town, calls into question the argument that memory is largely imagining.

While critically interrogating his own practices and arguments, Field, along with the other authors discussed in this review, relies on the overall assumptions and categories of social history. As the intellectual tool of the political left during apartheid, social history sought to uncover the agency of ordinary (“African”) South Africans and to incorporate into the written historical record their resistance to apartheid as well as their everyday experience of it. Oral history formed an integral part of this effort to undercover “histories from below.” Common themes in postapartheid social history scholarship are reflected in the books under review: antiapartheid resistance—both within and outside the borders of South Africa—(gendered) experiences of apartheid, and forced displacement.

With the celebration of South Africa’s twentieth year of democracy, it is essential that we question the value and methods of social history and evaluate its ability to hold the postapartheid regime, its institutions, and its scholarship to account. The political urgency of calling into question the concepts, methodologies, and tools of postapartheid scholarship is evident when we examine South Africa’s levels of violence and inequality. It is in this vein that critiques of social history have been offered, one of which Sean Field considers in Oral History, Community and Displacement. Drawing on Ciraj Rassool and Gary Minkely’s “Orality, Memory and Social History in South Africa” 1998), Field writes that these authors’ critique of the romanticization with which social historians approached the antiapartheid struggle was done in a sweeping manner and formed a “blanket characterization of social history” (6). But Field does not reflect on their argument that social history in South Africa generated a grand narrative of experience, read as “history from below,” by joining appropriations of oral discourses to nationalist and culturalist teleologies of resistance. Reluctant to engage the issues of power embedded in this narrative, social historians imposed themselves and their radical methods on ordinary people, rendered them as the authentic voice, and crafted them into representatives of correct political and historical practice. Basing their work on people’s experience of apartheid, without adequately questioning their own categories or concepts, Fields, Reynolds, Curry, and Ngcobo themselves may be seen as participating in grand narratives that not only recuperate social history modes of thinking, but also generate histories that can be used to legitimize a postapartheid state that, more often than not, mirrors its predecessor.

Perhaps we also need to interrogate the ways in which each of these authors and contributors relies on apartheid’s racial classifications. Reynold’s use of the term “African” excludes those previously classified as Coloured, Indian (or white, for that matter). Field’s discussions of “coloured” residents include little reference to the historically contested nature of the term. And Curry and Ngcobo’s invocation of apartheid’s four main racial categories not only recuperates apartheid’s racial logic, but also functions at a level of subaltern self-representation that reifies racial tropes. At this juncture in South Africa’s democracy we urgently need to call into question the foundations of these categories and take seriously the political stakes involved in the persistent use of them in the postapartheid present. And we ought also to ask whether narratives of resistance and removal are able to provide a critical account for the persistence of apartheid’s legacies, not only in South African society, but also in its institutions and its scholarship.