Podcast: Three Historians on Post-apartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts
Is South African history developing an authentic new discourse or is it stuck in the colonial archive? Two years into the democratic transition in South Africa, a little-known healer-diviner, Nicholas Tilana Gcaleka, stumbled onto the stage of history. He claimed to have brought the skull of Xhosa king Hintsa back to South Africa from Scotland, where he said he had traced it. Amidst a flurry of media attention, the skull was confiscated and handed to a team of scientists to “prove” its authenticity. They declared the cranium was that of a human female, and definitely not Hintsa. Gcaleka was proclaimed, at least, laughable, and at worst, a liar.
Gcaleka seems to have highlighted the limits that apartheid posed on the reworking of concepts of nation and identity. Author Premesh Lalu says in his book The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the shape of recurring pasts, that we are compelled to track the process of how a little-known healer-diviner, in his encounter with the history of colonialism, became entangled in the formation, regulation and transformation of historical statements relating to the deaths of Hintsa. Lalu calls for a history that makes a conceptual difference in the wake of apartheid, and which addresses the transition to a postapartheid era. Lalu proposes that this transition bypassed the colonial archive and therefore failed to anticipate its resilience.
Through mining a rich field of research, from colonial archival material to contemporary museum exhibitions, Lalu states that overcoming apartheid has required coming to terms not only with the effects of history, but with the discourse of history itself. Hear the views of Professor Lalu, along with those of historians Leslie Witz and Ciraj Rassool, in this podcast:
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Book Details
- The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the shape of recurring pasts by Premesh Lalu
Book homepage
EAN: 9780796922335
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