Storytelling and fraught histories: Phila Ndwandwe’s Blue Dress

Abstract

Twenty years after the final hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, researchers are unearthing and examining the stories, discourses and processes that formed the transition from the apartheid to post-apartheid periods. In this paper, I investigate the story of Phila Ndwandwe, killed by the security police in the late 1980s, whose body was the first to be exhumed by the commission. Ndwandwe’s story has been framed through various narrative devices, most prominently by an artwork by Judith Mason colloquially titled the Blue Dress. Tracing the stories constructed about Ndwandwe, I consider the performative and transformative potentials of storytelling and argue for a commitment to listening that resists mere understanding.