Country Of My Skull Research Articles

Reconstructing Apartheid, Redefining Racism

This essay examines transcripts from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission alongside literary and cinematic representations of the hearings and reflects on the challenges of confronting institutionalized racism through contemporary human rights discourse and its attendant modes of life narratives. The first section analyses the oral testimony of Ms Nomatise Tsobileyo – who spoke before the TRC's Human Rights Violations Committee in 1996. The second section then considers excerpts from and traces of Ms Tsobileyo's testimony in Antjie Krog's internationally renowned memoir Country of My Skull, and in the film based on Krog's book, In My Country. I argue that when eliciting and responding to testimony, the TRC tended to separate out bodily violence inflicted by the apartheid police from the witness's account of dispossession caused by apartheid laws and practices. When internationally marketed literary and cinematic representations reframe TRC testimonies by emphasizing the horrors inflicted on black bodies on the one hand and the guilt experienced by white characters on the other, they contribute to the commodification of mourning by further isolating stories of spectacular violence from their basis in institutionalized racism. In My Country, in particular, illustrates how commodified life narratives circulating in a neoliberal world order privatize racism when they address it primarily in terms of bodily rights violations requiring the admission of white guilt and a process of interpersonal reconciliation. What is increasingly obscured through these successive attempts at reframing TRC testimony is the economic inequality created by systematic dispossession and impoverishment of the majority of South Africans, the effects of which outlive the formal end of apartheid rule.

‘Zou de wereldbol een beetje aan het leeglopen zijn?’ Herman de Coninck over het Afrikaans en Afrikaner maatschappij, cultuur en politiek

In the institutional context of literature in Flanders Herman de Coninck (1944–97) was an important player (or “actor”). Theauthor is well known as a poet, a literary critic and editor of the Dutch Granta-like magazine Nieuw Wereldtijdschrift (NWT).Academics and essayists have paid much critical attention to de Coninck’s poetics and aesthetic views. In a recent anthology of Flemish poetry since the sixties, Hotel New Flandres (2008), he is called an innovative “paradigmatic poet” in the poetry system of Flanders. Much less known is his place in and relationship to the field of Afrikaans literature. Daniel Hugo published two anthologies with poetry of de Coninck in Afrikaans and Antjie Krog was invited by the Flemish editor to participate in NWT. Later on, these essays were rewritten and brought together in Krog’s Country of My Skull. Reading prose and poetry by de Coninck and focusing on references to South Africa, we can study his perspective on Afrikaans (language and literature), his points of view on social and political developments in the post-apartheid era. The purpose of this article is to present documentary material to illustrate and comment on de Coninck’s ideas on literature, language and society. This commentary on ideological and aesthetic opinions can form the basis for further discursive and institutional research with regard to the presence in and the image building of South Africa in the works by a canonized Flemish writer.

Performing dialogical truth and transitional justice: The role of art in the becoming post-apartheid of South Africa

In this article I elaborate on the potential role of the arts in the becoming post-apartheid of South Africa. As the close readings of discursive and visual artefacts such as Country of my Skull (Antjie Krog), The Man who Sang and the Woman who kept Silent (Judith Mason), and Indlovukati (Nandipha Mntambo) underline, articulating the memory of trauma in order to be able to create something new is not a linear and finite process but a cycle that has to be reiterated, time and again. Art’s dialogical character, materiality, and medium specificity allow it to perform contested truths and articulate complexities, in such a way as to help constitute new and multilayered communities.

‘They can never write the landscapes out of their system’: engagements with the South African landscape

This article explores the ways in which the South African author Antjie Krog challenges imperial and patriarchal assumptions about bodies and landscapes in order to enable an embodied engagement with the South African landscape. Post-apartheid South Africa presents particular challenges to white identity and Krog's work recognises that a reconceptualised relationship between her body as a white South African woman and the South African landscape is a necessary part of coming to terms with her place in the new South Africa. The article focuses on Krog's Country of my Skull (1998) and A Change of Tongue (2003). Both these works deal with her narrators' struggle to feel part of South Africa after the atrocities of apartheid that were committed in the name of white South Africans. While sections of these texts have been fictionalised, they also include non-fictional accounts of South Africa's past, specifically through the inclusion of snippets of testimony from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The article identify the challenges that Krog faces when she enters the over-determined discursive field of landscape writing in general and of South African landscape writing in particular and theorise how her embrace of bodies, mutuality and fluidity opens up new possibilities for being a white woman in the landscape of post-apartheid South Africa.

In My Country's Filmic Betrayals: Reification and the Ethics of Adapting Country of My Skull

In 1998, the noted South African poet Antjie Krog published Country of My Skull, an account of and a reflection on her experiences as a radio journalist covering her country's Truth and Reconciliat...

Global resonance, local amplification: Antjie Krog on a world stage

As a result of the publication of Country of my Skull, an extraordinary literary enactment of witness and confession, Antjie Krog has become internationally known as a writer profoundly engaged with the events and human drama uncovered by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her voice is read as that of an expert witness of trauma, forgiveness and the means by which the horrors of the past may be addressed. In seeking to understand how Krog came to be taken up internationally as a representative voice of the South African transition, I focus on a particular global–local nexus for an explanation. I theorise that dealing with the past via truth commissions, a global publishing context and the work of a local writer with a record of excellent literary output and political action enabled a fit which resulted in Krog coming to prominence on a world stage. This then amplified her public status in South Africa. I argue that Krog is emblematic of a new type of representative public person who is no longer afforded a hearing just because of the excellence of their ideas, writing or speech, but who also embodies pain, suffering and affectedness.

Die problematiek van onthou: Die proses van herinnering in Antjie Krog se Country of My Skull

Summary How does one deal with the past in the creation of a new myth and what role does memory play in this process of recreation? Antjie Krog's novel, Country of My Skull (2002), uses the South African past in this search of a new myth after the end of the old Apartheid myth. In this article the problem with truth and memory is investigated, where memory is described as subjective and unstable. As a result of the subjective and human nature of memory, the fallibility of memory is pointed out. In the same way as memory, truth is also dependent on perception and personal experience, also set in the past and is therefore subject to the problem of memory. It is only through the action of remembering that rectification and justice can take place and, in the end, can lead to reconciliation. Within the context of this essay, this process of remembering takes place through literature and the action of writing as the processing of the trauma of the past is investigated.

ARCHIVING RESISTANCE Women's Testimony at the Threshold of the State

Increasingly today, Fanon's imagination of the postcolonial subject of difference is reconceived in the mode of an international human rights discourse along the lines of reconciliation and reparations. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has become the paradigmatic instance of a state mechanism capable of inducing the change from nationalist to politico-social consciousness; so pervasive is its influence that Moroccan and Algerian commissions refer explicitly to the South African example and openly cite it as a model of reconciling the people. This article examines the ways that women's testimony of political violence is called upon in the nationalist postcolony to signify both a primitive sphere outside the boundaries of national memory and public debate and the progressive character of inclusion at the advent of the new state. This paradox is illustrated in the South African TRC's commitment to symbolic reparation and to providing a space for women's testimony despite the refusal of most women to testify. What conceptions of the human are naturalized in state-mandated projects of healing that depend upon such narratives? What new forms of subjection and resistance await the citizens of the modern postcolonial state? It is with these questions about the power of the symbol to deny `voice' while granting the rights of speech that I turn to Asia Djebar's Blanc de l'Algérie, Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull and Zoe Wicomb's David's Story as a counter to the politics of testimony.

Abusive Narratives: Antjie Krog, Rian Malan, and the Transmission of Violence

In appraisals of Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull, critics reiterate the failures of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and criticize Krog's use of victim testimonies. Critics have paid particular attention to the ways in which Krog moves between multiple subject positions as a white South African woman, a journalist, and an Afrikaner. These conflictual positionings are, in part, held responsible for what is seen as her inability to deal critically with the failures of the TRC. While there is certainly merit to these readings of Krog, this essay explores methods of reading Krog's memoir beyond her controversial use of testimonies. As a radio journalist, Krog captures the importance of media processes in constituting sites of witnessing. Specifically, she underlines the importance of the broadcast system that carried out the testifying voice and created communities of listeners. In reading Country of My Skull alongside Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart, another contentious memoir about apartheid, I suggest that narratives reporting the aftermath of violence on people may inherently always betray victims since writers and readers invariably move to forms of closure. It is important then that readerly sensibilities to apparatuses of transmission are interrogated.

Hospitality in Karel Schoeman's Promised Land and Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull

Summary This essay places Karel Schoeman's representation of an ethically stunted and uncompromising Afrikaner community in his novel, Promised Land (1978) in counterpoint to Antjie Krog's efforts, in Country of My Skull (1999), to inaugurate a new ethics of representation in response to the demands and opportunities of the post-apartheid dispensation. We relate the two texts by reading them through the lens of Derrida's seminar on the ethics of hospitality. First, we discuss Krog's version of hospitality as an implicit response to the dynamics of moral myopia captured so vividly in Schoeman's dystopian portrait of Afrikanerdom. Second, we address the purported plagiarism in Country of My Skull in the context of the protocols for hosting the voice of the other in those works defined as “creative non-fiction”. In our concluding discussion we shift our attention to the ethical implications of various practices of citation.

The Elusive Pursuit of Truth and Justice: A Review Essay; History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa; Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa; Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions; Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Bearing

Book Review| January 01 2007 The Elusive Pursuit of Truth and Justice: A Review Essay; History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa; Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa; Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions; Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth Commission in South Africa.; Truth Commissions and Courts: The Tension between Criminal Justice and the Search for Truth; The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-apartheid State Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. New York: Three Rivers, 2000.Teresa Godwin Phelps, Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.Deborah Posel and Graeme Simpson, eds., Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2002.Fiona C. Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth Commission in South Africa. London: Pluto, 2003.William A. Schabas and Shane Darcy, eds., Truth Commissions and Courts: The Tension between Criminal Justice and the Search for Truth. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 2004.Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-apartheid State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Mary Nolan Mary Nolan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2007) 2007 (97): 143–154. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2006-020 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mary Nolan; The Elusive Pursuit of Truth and Justice: A Review Essay; History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa; Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa; Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions; Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth Commission in South Africa.; Truth Commissions and Courts: The Tension between Criminal Justice and the Search for Truth; The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-apartheid State. Radical History Review 1 January 2007; 2007 (97): 143–154. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2006-020 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsRadical History Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. MARHO: The Radical Historians' Organization, Inc.2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: (RE)VIEWS You do not currently have access to this content.

Remembering to forget: Testimony, collective memory and the genesis of the ‘new’ South African nation in country of my skull

In this essay I consider the role of memory in the creation of the post‐apartheid nation: how does memory – individual and communal – function in the shaping of nationhood? Specifically, how does a text such as Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull, which seeks to straddle the divide of personal, individualised memory and collective memory, contribute to this process in post‐apartheid South Africa? Drawing on the proliferation of testimonies which emerged from the Truth Commission, in this text Krog actively contributes to the construction of collective memory. But, as Ernest Renan reminds us, although “the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common” – and shared historical narratives are crucial in this regard – it is equally important that the nation collectively suppresses specific aspects of knowledge of the past. Renan continues: “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of the nation”. What is it that Country of My Skull asks us to remember, what should we forget? And what are the ethical implications thereof?

The ethics of infidelity in country of my skull

For some readers, Antjie Krog's integration of others’ personal testimonies and her fictionalised, extramarital romance in Country of My Skull were controversial approaches to representing personal and political atrocities. This essay argues that these two prominent literary features in her book – the citations and the romantic affair – are in fact the basis for its ethics of acknowledgement and inclusive community. I argue that Krog's extensive citations convey loss so powerfully in part because they illustrate the very limits of her language as well as the radical decontextualisation of the traumatic events themselves. Likewise, the fictional affair is a figure for the larger loyalty to others that Krog proposes, an acknowledgment of others that feels like a betrayal of all that one knows.

The universal sanctity of whiteness: Antjie Krog's negotiation of black responses to white transformation in a change of tongue

Country of My Skull (1998) emerged out of Antjie Krog's participation as a journalist covering the Truth and Reconciliation proceedings and consists mostly of the collected stories of individual trauma inflicted by the apartheid regime, which are overlaid with her own responses to these graphic details. A Change of Tongue (2003) is more autobiographical and personal than the earlier work, more searching in its negotiation of the complexities and paradoxes confronting white identities in relation to a new sense of unhomeliness in a space which had been reserved exclusively for whites as home. It is also less comfortably indicting of the regime responsible for the atrocities, and more willing to confront the continued force of whiteness as a cultural construct. Studies in whiteness are employed to investigate Krog's experimentation with genre and her experience of ‘race’. The narrative perspective and its engagement with a post‐apartheid crisis in white identity, is explored, paying specific attention to the encounters recorded in the book with black South Africans. This is done in order to map Krog's understanding of what post‐apartheid whiteness might represent and how it might be transformed. Such a mapping demonstrates the ambivalences that emerge in the interstices of Krog's painful grappling with her growing sense of un‐belonging as a white woman in post‐apartheid South Africa.

We who belong to this landscape: Antjie Krog and the politics of space

Because the intersection of space and ideology is so prominent in South Africa, the appropriation of physical space becomes a crucial aspect of ideological struggle. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way landscapes are aestheticised. In a situation where an alienation from the landscape has occurred, a re‐identification is needed. When spaces are reoccupied, translated, and invested with new significance, it is never simply a literal appropriation of space. Instead, the effort of such a reappropriation of physical space impacts in complex ways on the way identity is negotiated and valued. This paper argues that Antjie Krog's recent English prose works, Country of My Skull and A Change of Tongue, participate in and comment on this reappraisal and refraction of South African subjectivities precisely through their attentiveness to the contested nature of material space. Moreover, the way these memoirs engage space relates directly to the kinds of anxieties generated around the factuality/fictionality of Krog's texts that have dominated criticism of her work, especially in the last year or so.

Confession and public life in post‐apartheid South Africa: A Foucauldian reading of Antjie Krog's country of my skull

Summary Truth commissions around the world have given the technique of confession a new public currency and political power. Many works of literature thematising these commissions have also adopted the technique of confession for literary purposes. In this paper I bring Foucault's understanding of the technique of confession, and his discourse on the role of public intellectuals in modernity, to bear upon an examination of Antjie Krog's literary reflection of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), entitled Country of My Skull (1998). I look at how this text, and Krog's subsequent public intellectual status as a witness of the TRC, perpetuate the technique of confession without problematising it in ways that Foucault's work would suggest is necessary.

Human Rights, Storytelling, and the Position of the Beneficiary: Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull

In the end we are a society of people, not of ideas, a fragile web of interdependent humans, not of stances.—Pumla Gobodo-MadikizelaOne of the most compelling criticisms to emerge during South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings called attention to the fact that those who benefited from the everyday policies and practices of the apartheid regime were neither identified as complicit in perpetuating systemic violence nor called to account. Nor was their implicated position in the apartheid state extensively analyzed in the commission's report. Commenting at the time on the inadequacy of the TRC process to identify beneficiaries of the apartheid regime and expose its structural violence, Mahmood Mamdani wrote that the TRC “has been interested only in violations outside the law, in benefits which are corruptions, but not in the systematic benefit which was conferred on beneficiaries at the expense of the vast majority of people in this country” (“Reconciliation” 3; also qtd. in Young 149). Mamdani here asserts that the ethical concept of the beneficiary is central to truth telling, reconciliation, and transitional nation building. His trenchant critique implicitly questions whether the truth-and-reconciliation project, relying as it does on the management of justice through the juridical statuses of “victim” and “perpetrator,” can deliver on its promise of addressing injustice and the aftereffects of radical injury and harm. Those positioned neither as victims nor as perpetrators are not called to recognize the benefits to them of structural violence, through which power, privilege, and “corporeal vulnerability” are unevenly distributed (Butler, Precarious Life 30). Nor are they asked to “bear moral responsibility to redress” the consequences of injustice (Mamdani, “Diminished Truth” 183). In response to Mamdani's critique, we want to consider how the ethical stance of the beneficiary can become visible in relation to victim and perpetrator positions and to what effect.

<i>Country of my skull/Skull of my country</i>: Krog and Zagajewski, South Africa and Poland

In the ninth poem of the cycle “land van genade en verdriet” (“country of grace and sorrow”) in the collection “Kleur kom nooit alleen nie” (“Colour never comes on its own”), Antjie Krog contends that the old is “stinking along” ever so cheerfully/ robustly in the new South African dispensation. This could also hold true for the new democratic Poland. Krog and the Polish poet Adam Zagajewksi could, in fact, be described as “intimate strangers”, specifically with regard to the mirrored imagery of “country of my skull”/“skull of my country” present in their work. The notion of “intimate strangers” may be seen as pointing toward the feminine dimension of subjectivity, which could be elaborated along the lines of Bracha Ettinger’s concept of “matrixial borderlinking”. Ettinger has made a significant contribution to the field of psychoanalysis, building on Freud and Lacan. She investigates the subject’s relation to the m/Other, and the intimate matrixial sharing of “phantasm”, “jouissance” and trauma among several entities. Critical of the conventional “phallic” paradigm, Ettinger turns to the womb in exploring the “borderlinking” of the I and the non-I within the matrix (the psychic creative “borderspace”). With these considerations as point of departure, and with specific reference to the closing poem in Krog’s “Country of my skull” and Zagajewski’s “Fire” (both exploring “weaning” experiences in recent personal and public history), I intend to show how the public/political is connected to the personal/psychological, and vice versa, and how committed literary works like those of Krog and Zagajewski can be clarified further from a psychoanalytical perspective. The image of the skull in the texts under scrutiny is investigated with recourse to the Lacanian notion of the “cavity”, as adopted and adapted by Ettinger. True to the mirror experience as described within psychoanalysis, this exercise in mirroring Krog and Zagajewski has confirmed the ambiguous, eluding and illusory nature of identification and identity.

Accountability, acknowledgement and the ethics of “quilting” in Antjie Krog's country of my skull

Summary This paper is primarily concerned with accountability and acknowledgement, and their relationship to one another, in Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull (1998). Arguing that both accountability and acknowledgement become ethically problematic in Krog's transposition of one form of textual practice to another (for example, her transposing of testimony and of academic non‐fictional texts into fictional narrative or poetry), the paper proposes that two very different ethical problems arise in Country of My Skull because of an elision of textual and generic frames that ultimately erases traces to textual “origins”: whether that origin be the testimonies given at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, or other textual materials used by Krog in the making of this text. The ethical consequence of this muddying of genres and textual frames is twofold: first, the appropriation of individual testimonial voices and, second, plagiarism ‐ two very different ethical transgressions which, nevertheless, bear consideration alongside one another since the two may be seen to emerge from the same textual practice as Krog's; what she refers to as “quilting”. While Krog sees textual quilting as allowing for a multivocal text that does not present a singular or coherent notion of national truth, I will argue that it also allows Krog to transpose one form of textuality into a different generic frame altogether. While this is not in and of itself problematic, the ethical consequences of the transposition, reinterpretation, and transformation of one textual object to another require careful consideration. The paper ultimately suggests that fictional and poetic texts need to acknowledge and be accountable to the original texts that they transpose and transform by providing the reader with a clear and interpretable trace‐back to that original.

Editor's Notes

Editor’s Notes Since its inception six years ago, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative has been dedicated to the simple proposition that truth matters. Although factual narrative remains difficult to define with absolute precision, we have adopted the Tim O'Brien credo that if one hears or reads a great story that claims to be true, one will inevitably ask the question: "Did that really happen?" And, as O'Brien reminds us: "If the answer matters, you've got your answer." This year, courtesy of a Fulbright research/lectureship to South Africa, I have had the chance to experience first hand the social, political, and artistic power of complex and intertwining narratives that claim to be true. Now celebrating the first ten years of its post-Apartheid democracy, the Republic of South Africa is perhaps the only nation in the world to have staked its political and social future on the complementary concepts of truth and reconciliation. Instead of burying its racist past or merely extracting revenge on those who perpetrated it, the nation of South Africa seems to believe that confronting the traumatic story of its history might ensure a more just and equitable future. We all could learn from them. Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu convened South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an extraordinary invitation to both the victims and the perpetrators of the old South Africa. All were asked to bring to the public arena their truthful accounts of life under apartheid—the torture, the disappearances, the beatings, and the shootings—in an effort to confront the meaning of these stories rather than to pretend they never happened. Though the commission's work and record is far too complex to summarize here, the concepts behind its work are relevant to anyone [End Page vii] who has ever tried to construct a truthful narrative or to read it with full critical awareness. South Africa's story seems to offer compelling examples of the problems and implications of the nonfictional claim and its attempt to recover or complicate truth. Obviously, narrative versions of "truth" here in South Africa have changed radically in the transition from the old regime to the new regime; therefore the careful study of these narratives both destabilizes a naïve notion of "truth" as well as demonstrates the deep stakes (or implications) that writers and readers have in the interplay of constructed texts, truth claims, and actual lives (or deaths). Though truth is a socially negotiated concept, its narrative power to affect actual lives is as meaningful as it is contested. A white South African colleague of good conscience recently recalled her secondary school history text, From Van Riebeeck to Verwoerd, which presented the "truth" of South African history to a generation of young scholars. In this account, the nation's history became the story of Afrikaner whiteness, traced from its founding European settler to the architect of an apartheid philosophy devised to protect that "whiteness" with the full force of ideological and political power. (Lest we retreat to smugness on hearing this account, the Americans among us might do well to recall how we told our own stories about the taming of the American frontier.) The transformation of the Van Riebeeck to Verwoerd "truth" to a story more consonant with what it actually means to be South African has absorbed this nation for the past ten years, spurring a South African Constitution widely acknowledged to be the most progressive in the world—even in the midst of intractable economic inequality. Along the way, the nation has listened to the traumatic stories of its past—listened and largely offered forgiveness and reconciliation when the stories revealed a genuine commitment to own up to the responsibility and implications of that past. Would that more nations were up to this challenge. The process has not been easy—and along the way has spawned literary nonfiction startling in its implicating power. One thinks of Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull, an account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission written by a former radio reporter for the South African Broadcasting Corporation; Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's A Human Being Died That Night, the story of...