Rethinking Narratives of Removal and Resistance in Postapartheid South Africa

Pamela Reynolds. War in Worcester: Youth and the Apartheid State. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. xii +239 pp. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00. Cloth. $26.00. Paper.Dawne Y. Curry. Apartheid on a Black Isle: Removal and Resistance in Alexandra, South Africa. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. xvi + 180 pp. List of Tables. List of Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $95.00. Paper.Lauretta Ngcobo, ed. Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South African Women in Exile. Scottsville, S.A.: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012. xxix + 211 pp. Photographs. $34.00, R195.00. Paper.Sean Field. Oral History, Community, and Displacement Imagining Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Palgrave Studies in Oral History, xvi + 221 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $100.00. Paper.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. …