Holocaust Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa

• In Event: Holocaust Memory and Memorialization through the Prisms of Race, Apartheid, and Expressionism

Abstract

As South Africa negotiated its transition to democracy in the early 1990s, one of the historical analogies most frequently invoked was between the ‘twin atrocities’ of apartheid and the Holocaust. The genocide of European Jewry was perceived as a potent historical benchmark for understanding what had happened in SA, for envisioning justice and reconciliation, and for thinking about how apartheid might be historicized and commemorated.

The larger study from which this paper is drawn explores how the Holocaust shaped responses to apartheid, a weighty question not least because SA’s system of racially-based politics was formalized just three years after the end of WWII. The Holocaust was regularly invoked by people of diverse backgrounds and political motivations, but different groups drew starkly different conclusions about the implications of the connection. Some sought to downplay the links; others overstated them, challenging the state with the most morally potent language they could muster. For Jews, the Holocaust was powerful currency in the debate about how to relate to racially-motivated human rights abuses. Despite the pervasiveness of Nazism in SA public discourse, there has been little examination of Holocaust memory as it developed across five decades. This conspicuous absence in the growing literature on Holocaust memory is one that my research seeks to address.

My paper will focus on the period following apartheid’s collapse in the early 1990s. It is based on substantial primary sources including newspapers and archival materials. I will argue that the Holocaust was central to a wider process of creating consensual memory cultures with the aim of reconciliation and nation-building. It was also a means for the newly-elected government to stake out the moral high ground in the new political order, establishing its commitment to human rights and restoring the country’s image on the international stage. The Holocaust has become the cornerstone of human rights education programs, and was integral to the conceptualization of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It has also paradoxically become one of the key conduits for the Jewish community’s re-integration into the new SA, despite the community’s emphasis on the Holocaust’s uniqueness under apartheid.

author

• Shirli Gilbert, University of Southampton