Liberation struggle, memory and freedom in Mongane Serote's Freedom Lament and Song

Abstract

Often described as the longest and last struggle against western colonialism on the continent of Africa, the South African liberation history was also characterised by an unparalleled persecution that translated into exile – literal and metaphorical – for both victims and perpetrators alike. It also accounts for why the liberation history provides a strong motivation for reflections on many planes in the wake of the official collapse of apartheid in the 1990s. One such was the state-instituted Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) shortly after the inauguration of the first democratically elected government in 1994. Nevertheless, writers and artists in general have also intervened in response to the imperative of reconciliation from a contrastively private angle as a counterweight to the official brief of the TRC. This article therefore examines what can be read as Mongane Wally Serote's response to the mandate of reconciliation in his poem Freedom Lament and Song (1997). It points to the poem's value, particularly in the way it engages with memory, racial victimhood, liberation struggle and the eventual attainment of freedom with the collapse of apartheid, all in a manner that espouses a more pragmatic approach and recommendation for the management and maintenance of reconciliation and freedom in a new South Africa.