:“I Saw a Nightmare …”: Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976
2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/ahr.114.3.871
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Legal Issues in South Africa
ResumoHelena Pohlandt-McCormick's book is a comprehensive and intimate account of the revolt that broke the silence of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Pohlandt-McCormick reopens the evidence on the events of mid-1976 and brings in new evidence gleaned from interviews with participants conducted twenty-five years after the uprising. This review is of the e-book whose form, with clickable links to archives, photos, commission reports, and interview transcripts, makes for an incredibly rich reading experience. The book starts with the photograph of a dying Hector Pieterson carried in the arms of a friend. Pieterson, a young African student, was widely believed to be first to die in the Soweto uprising, although Pohlandt-McCormick notes that a different student probably was killed before him. This photo “became an icon of history—constituent part and instrument of collective history and memory” (chapter one). The photo as an icon has been appropriated by the official narratives of what happened in Soweto in 1976.
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