epitomized by the state-instituted Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Serote’s
intervention does more to point at the grey areas of history that culminated in the long-
drawn struggle of liberation from apartheid, a historical epoch in which majority of
blacks suffered much death, exclusion, repression, dispossession and exile. Therefore, if
the liberation from such state-backed acts of discrimination eventually came to an end
through the collective efforts of the advocates of human and racial equality in South
Africa, the place of the unknown fighters, martyrs of the struggle whose shed blood
brought freedom, should as well be mourned. This is why the poem can also be limned as
providing the missing links in the official framework for revising history for the purpose
of moving forward in the post-liberation era, in which the entrenchment of democracy
has been interpreted in this chapter to mean a kind of double return from exile for both
victims and perpetrators of apartheid.
But also because liberation in South Africa has also coincided with liberalization, the
overwhelming purchase of globalization has caught the nation in the mesh of mobility,
which may be why there can be no absolute guarantee that all South Africans will live
only within the enclave of the nation. Diasporic experiences are therefore imminent. Yet
the chapter has also partly established that the blame for dispersal at the present time
cannot be completely heaped at the doorstep of globalization as the nation state is also
complicit in how exile and migration are engendered. The anticipation of this has thus
informed the interpretation of History is the Home Address , where the inevitability of
“going away” is engaged. And by deploying Ashcroft’s concept of “transnation”, the
poem has been read as one in which diaspora is reconfigured to give centrality to the
nation of origin. This is important because it is only through the knowledge of the nation
and the utility of this knowledge that we can remain relevant in the global scheme of
things: “for we can bring nothing else to the global village/ but what we dream and what
we bring from home”. And if this stricture is adhered to by those South Africans and
indeed Africans caught in the web of migration, the reconfiguration of diaspora will put
the homeland at the centre. This way, the threat to the relevance of the homeland and the
nation in the age of globalization will be reduced, giving credence to Ashcroft’s
(2007a:8) assertion that diaspora, like charity, must begin at home.