The Farm, the River and the Picnic Spot: Topographies of Terror1

Abstract

In the mid-1980s, around ten unidentified persons were found dismembered in rural areas in and around Bophuthatswana. This article tracks the journey of these corpses, from their deaths, through amnesty hearings of their killers, to their recovery and reburial. Through this journey, the biographical life of these corpses has shifted from ‘terrorists’, to victims of state terror, to their current position as heroes of liberation. The imaginaries of violence that underlay these murders sprang not from the unknown, but from the familiarity of childhood, family and friends. Disposal of the ‘difficult’ corpse produced an economy of death where the body through display was employed to do productive work. Following the TRC, these bodies have entered memorialisation practices of the post-apartheid state. Although these murders represent the numeric margins of state violence and its limits, memorialisation initiatives have ignored this marginality, preferring a representation of state terror that provides a perfect counter-foil to the heroism of guerrillas as the principal bearers of freedom. While this heroic representation is welcomed by families of the men, their embrace serves to remind the new state of the unfulfilled promise of the post-apartheid state, rather than as a sign of closure.