apartheid social practices, it may be expected to tract a fresh trajectory. But this may be
less of a linear journey than anticipated, for it finds itself with a creased Janus face,
vigilant of the past, watchful of the future. (Ingrid de Kok 1996:5)It is against this backdrop of memory and the consciousness of building a new South
African nation that I begin to read the two selected post-apartheid texts of Serote in this
chapter. If the end goal of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was to initiate and
execute an official theatre of reconciliation and negotiated settlement for the nation as a
way of bringing the transition process to a conclusion (de Kok, 5), compelling the nation
to be content with some measure of social and collective amnesia, the task of literature
goes beyond this negotiated line. For:
When the literary project revisits history, it does so not to produce an authorized account,
not to resolve history. Its charge is private, not public. Its bid is to unwrite, retell, and
reorganize the nature of the record, investigating the relationships between stories and
history, staging the drama of individual and collective experiences and perspectives,
examining the discontinuities and lacuna. (de Kok, 5)Serote’s poetry falls into this category of revising history precisely because, beyond the
official tendency to almost invariably approach issues of memory and history from a
convenient point of conciliation and amnesia, owing to the presumed primacy and
urgency of building a “Rainbow Nation”, Serote, like most other writers in the post-
apartheid era, cannot but engage with the past at the “private” level. Not only will this
allow for “retelling” and “reorganization” of history, but it will more substantially enable
a thorough and critical contextualization of the past in a manner that will justify its
relevance as an order by which the present is framed. On this score, and by giving
centrality to the sub-structural relevance of the past, there is an exposure of the fault line
that is inherent in any call that hankers unnecessarily on the present to the exclusion of
the past. Avoiding a detour of the past in order not to be complicit in the tendency to
undermine its values in the building of a new nation thus provides the springboard for
having insights into how the various struggles of the past, both at the collective and
individual levels, constitute the meaning the configuration of the present holds. If so,
then, written against the antecedent of the protest collections of the 1970s and 80s like No
Baby must Weep (1975), Freedom Lament and Song is a retrospective assessment of
South Africa’s “long walk to freedom”, to borrow a phrase from Nelson Mandela.