This book is the outcome of research on historical memory in times of major upheaval – a programme sponsored by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) and the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Nordrhein-Westfalen (KWI) (p. 1). Possibly, the title and subtitle were addressed to different audiences. The master theme is the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanism that transcends cultural specificities and is understood as a model of and for reconciliation in the aftermath of extreme violence, such as genocide and apartheid. Among the questions that recur are those about the production of enmity as a moral and ontological differentiation between ‘self’ and ‘other’ (Rüsen, p. 171) and the coexistence of former ‘enemies’ in a new political context (Gobodo-Madikizela, p. 210).
The book's structure seeks to relate ‘perspective’ and ‘praxis’, and has three parts. The first group of essays presents an ‘African perspective’. Macamo calls for African intellectuals to ‘Africanize’ sociology (p. 25) and modernize ‘ordinary Africans’ (pp. 24–5). Joubert praises South African oral traditions (pp. 28–41) as ‘a mode of communication in the presentation of the past’ (p. 28) and argues for the ‘responsibility of modernity’ (p. 47). Jewsiewicki contextualizes memory practices in Congo and South Africa against the background of a public space forged by audio-visual technologies (p. 54). He argues that unity beyond colonialism and apartheid can only be achieved in a distanced past (pp. 61, 64). For Bisanswa the meaning of the ‘memory of crossing’ (p. 79) is to overcome the divides between categories of identity inherited from colonial discourse and reproduced in the discourse of international journalism (p. 81). Diawara suggests a new African historiography should start from local knowledge in the present (pp. 93, 100) and counter the divide between developmental discourses focused on the present and historical discourses focused on the past (p. 89). Grundlingh agrees with Diawara. In his study of the centenary of the South African War he argues that public commemorations are not about historical accuracy but ‘to derive maximum benefit from the past in the present’ (p. 118). Harries disagrees, saying there are limits to the acceptability of revisionist accounts of apartheid (p. 138). Lategan closes the ‘African perspective’ with a speculative chapter on memory and an open view of the future (p. 151).
The second group of essays forms an ‘intercultural perspective’. Rüsen reflects on the significance of commemorating the Holocaust in the narrative of a West German identity (p. 170). Ghosh adds an Indian perspective with a critique of how the myth of Ayodhya is used by Hindu elites to create an ‘uncontested zone of collective memory’ (pp. 190–1). From South Korea, Han reflects on the limits of acceptability of a policy of forgiveness when perpetrators do not acknowledge their crimes (p. 194).
In the third group of essays are two contributions on the praxis of memory as forgiveness and healing written from a personal experience of violence under apartheid (Gobodo-Madikizela) and in Auschwitz (Kor). For Gobodo-Madikizela only genuine remorse can make forgiveness possible (p. 225), whereas Kor testifies that to achieve healing forgiveness must originate in the victim not in the perpetrator (p. 233). But, perhaps inadvertently, she also opens up consciousness as a space of inquiry when she shows how deeply rooted state violence is within social relations: ‘[t]he day I forgave the Nazis I forgave my parents because they failed to save me from a destiny in Auschwitz, and I also forgave myself for hating my parents’ (p. 233).
It is not clear why case studies from Germany, India and South Korea are classified as ‘intercultural’, whereas those from Congo/Zaïre, South Africa, Niger and Mozambique are labelled ‘African’. The Eurasian continent is no less territorially compact than the African. If the genre of the narrative were a classificatory principle, then Bisanswa's contribution would be in the third group, given that it is also an instance of the ‘writing of memory [as] a serious game’ (p. 86). The articulation of individual and institutional levels of memory praxis is nonetheless represented primarily as public speech.
Regrettably, the editors have used a ‘sampling’ method that does not do justice to the dialogic relationship presupposed by a plurality of perspectives motivated by a common project. The ‘samples’ derive some unity from the analogy between apartheid and the Nazi regimes as paradigms of evil by contrast to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a paradigm of redemption through the publicizing of private suffering. Derrida, on the other hand, argues that forgiveness is impossible precisely because it does not have a public face: it is the respect for the unintelligibility of the secret of experience (On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Routledge, 2001, p. 55). It cannot be assumed that the victim is innocent because of a putative non-participation in violence. This is a book that may not appeal to an audience already persuaded that no act of violence, such as killing, ever occurs in a cultural vacuum.
