KEY AIMS & OBJECTIVES
Creating renewed dialogue and learning about legacies of historic violence and injustice in South Africa to challenge silences and biases.
Promoting collaboration between scholars, activists and artists as a decolonial artistic intervention tool in South Africa’s public memoryscape.
Devising and disseminating relevant and accessible educational material both to national and international audiences alike.
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an amnesty provision in the country’s reconstruction from apartheid-era crimes, conducted its work under a restorative approach to justice. South Africa is thus an important site to understand the modes of memory production following the transition, as well as frustrations regarding who is included, and who is excluded from these narratives.
Unfinished Business conducts its work under the main approaches to transitional justice.
The ATJRN is an interdisciplinary network of African scholars and senior-level practitioners who are working in the field of transitional justice in Africa.
Unfinished Business: Memory and Counter Narrative to the Rainbow Nation promotes and supports critical engagement with the fault-lines in the implementation of transitional justice in South Africa.
Since the end of apartheid, heritage in South Africa has been a site of major contestation between those who wish to preserve memorials of the country’s abusive past and increasingly vocal voices seeking to remove relics of colonialism and apartheid. On the one hand, some argue that understanding the symbols of the past is critical for the present, no matter how violent the history they symbolise. This is particularly apparent at the Castle of Good Hope, the oldest colonial building in South Africa. The Castle was initially built by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century and over the course of the last four hundred years it has served as a seat of colonial government, a military base, as well as a site of torture and imprisonment during the apartheid era. It currently is a tourist attraction housing a museum where militarized masculinity forms a central part of its exhibits. Scant attention is paid at the site to the suffering of indigenous people nor their gendered experiences […].
Collaborations between scholars, activists and artists allows for an expansion of our understandings of these structured social worlds beyond the world of scientific and scholarly language. Building on the idea that collaborative practices can significantly enhance understandings in the social sciences and advance education.
“Unfinished Business” explores the many hidden memory battles about representations of historic violence in South Africa. Through a focus on the role of memorialisation and the arts in problematizing the politics of transition, we hope to reveal how creative and cultural interventions can reframe the politics of memory. As Olivera Simic notes; art can provide a ‘break from the narrative of denial’, can recognize past injustices and ‘provide symbolic reparation and important unofficial counterparts for truth finding.’
Associate Professor Helen Scanlon (Project Director)
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