with bare hands this history/ which keeps repeating and again repeats itself/ they held it/
they intervened/ in life and blood/ generations upon generations/ they lay/these African
men and women/ they hurled themselves into time/ into history which was rattling/
flying/ repeating itself” (7). That the foundation of the success of the struggle was laid in
the resistance of the forebears who “held” history is very crucial. Again, that there is a
continual emphasis on the activity of history in the repetition of itself especially in the
wake of apartheid appears less presentimental than cautionary. For the tendency to curry
favour for a group to the exclusion of others is part of human nature; but the ability to
resist its divisive attraction is what can ensure a truly democratic unfolding in the South
African nation.
In what follows in the second part of the poem, there is a reinvention of memory and
history in the horizon of passion and emotion. This is perhaps necessary because the
process of the “lament” becomes more compelling when facts of history are conflated
with emotional elements of narration and remembering which conventional African
historical scholarship however tends to elide. It is for this obvious but painful fact about
African history that Jacques Depelchin in his book Silences in African History (2005)
argues that, where the narrative involves human experience, it is impossible to rule out
the conflation of passions and emotions in history. Therefore, as Deplechin further
contends, if contemporary African history fails to live up to this expectation, it is then to
the arts, especially literature, one must turn for an un-detoured account of the African
past. The logic of this argument is that the exclusion of these elements only helps to
perpetuate the many silences that are evident in the narration of the African past.
Viewed against the strength of the foregoing contention, the second part laments the
passage of the struggle by bringing into remembrance the various horrendous
circumstances in which liberation struggle fighters, ordinary and unknown nationalists,
whose names may never have come up at the TRC, lost their lives. What is more, the
process of remembrance also hints at the fact that the figures of the struggle were also
locatable within communal spaces of struggle which for some reasons were as protean as
they were crucial in this personal testifying. The panorama into which the knowledge of