Contesting remembering and forgetting: the archive of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Abstract

After sketching a context of remembering and forgetting in apartheid South Africa, this article overviews the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as process and goes on to examine the TRC as archive. Records of the TRC and public access to these records as well as records about the TRC are discussed. Concerns about future scenarios of custody, preservation and access are raised. The dynamic relationship between remembering, forgetting and imagining must be given space, and measures that limit the ongoing contestation of meaning must be resisted.


(Innovation: 2002 24: 1-8)