Citation

Fassin D. Soc. Anthropol. 2008; 16(3): 312-328.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, European Association of Social Anthropologists, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1469-8676.2008.00045.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The post-apartheid period has been marked by a dual relation to memory. On the one hand, the process of reconciliation, nation-building and abolition of the colour line has engaged a definitive rupture with the past. On the other hand, a form of resentment expresses a more ambivalent and painful acknowledgement that the past is still deeply present through racism, inequalities and prejudices. The AIDS crisis both as an objective – the rapid spread of the infection – and subjective phenomenon – the apprehension of the epidemic through controversies – has revealed this duality. Using Thabo Mbeki's statements on the infection, but also on race relations and national commemorations, I try to analyse beyond the obvious paranoid style a politics of memory which unveils hidden truths. The embodiment of the past thus recovered involves both the historical condition, that is the inscription of social structures in bodies and lives, and the experience of history, understood as the elaboration of representations, discourses and narratives accounting for the course of events. Considered in this light, conspiracy theories become not so much fantasies as factual realities, including genocidal projects under apartheid. The recognition of this unfinished business of time is a necessary step in the construction of a common future.