Stories of Exile: South African Resistance to Apartheid, 1960-1990

FAIN: FB-51632-05

Helena Pohlandt-McCormick
University of Minnesota (Northfield, MN 55057-1574)

To understand the exile experience in South Africa (1960-1990), I propose a fieldwork-based historical study of in-depth oral life histories, backed by archival research, with former political exiles representative of the several generations and multiple – gendered – experiences of exile, defined broadly as external political exile, internal exile, banishment and displacement, and as exile of the mind, political exclusion and psychological alienation. A history of the nature and experience of exile and of its association with loss and memory is timely and necessary if South Africa is to make a decisive break with the apartheid past – with its history of silencing individuals, traumatizing society, and deliberately distorting public memory.