The grant created a space for empathetic public conversation portraying historical trauma on a range of platforms, including theatre performances, film screenings and public dialogues.
The grant created a space for empathetic public conversation portraying historical trauma on a range of platforms, including theatre performances, film screenings and public dialogues. Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Chair for Historical Trauma and Transformation at Stellenbosch University, explains: “In turning to the arts, we were careful to use the arts in order to face the past without necessarily reawakening the divisions that characterised the conflicts that defined it.”
The grant kicked off with a performance in the Stellenbosch University Museum in September 2018 by the Igugulethu Arts Academy. Their play, titled No Christmas for us: South Africa is based on the real events that unfolded in December 1976 when the apartheid government’s army descended on the Cape Town township of Nyanga and attacked residents, killing members of the community indiscriminately because they were believed to be pursuing anti-apartheid goals. Nokuzola Zoe Bikwana, who witnessed the events as a child, wrote the original award-winning script for the play. A second performance of the play was performed to an international audience at the Recognition, Reparation, Reconciliation: The Light and Shadow of Historical Trauma Conference (RRR Conference) in December 2018.
Africa’s Hope is a theatre production that is based on the genocide in Rwanda. Combining music, narration, acting and dance, the performance sketched the stories of survivors at various stages during the genocide and showed how Rwanda has risen from the destruction of the genocide to a place in which the families of victims and perpetrators are now living together and rebuilding their country. This production that was performed by the Mashirika Theatre Group to a packed Drostdy Theatre in Stellenbosch in August 2019, moved the audience to tears.
These two plays were followed by facilitated sessions between performers and members of the audience, thereby creating a new ‘language’ for engaging the past and allowing participants to reflect on their own position in relation to the events that were being enacted.
A variety of film screenings representing trauma and healing were also shown at the RRR conference in December 2018. The Senator George Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice showcased their use of film as a way of engaging the arts to deal with trauma and healing in Northern Ireland. Cahal Mclaughlin showed a film titled Armagh Stories that depicted the Troubles in Northern Ireland. South African films presented included Siona O’Connell’s on the transgenerational consequences of forced removals in South Africa, and Mark Kaplan’s account of a mother’s search for the remains of her son who had been murdered by the apartheid security police.
The anchor activity of the Rosa Luxemburg grant was the Sigrid Rausing Dialogues that took place as part of the RRR Conference in December 2018. These unique and intricate dialogues took the form of parallel and plenary sessions where stories from different conflict contexts were shared by victims and descendants of trauma. The unique value proposition of the dialogues was that the facilitators purposefully allowed the dialogues to evolve as an organic process without a set format in place. “The intention was to move beyond binary understandings of violence and its consequences, and to allow each personal journey to be heard and honoured by those present,” said Prof Gobodo-Madikizela.
The Sigrid Rausing Dialogues did not only address the intergenerational impact of collective trauma but also interrogated the ways in which acknowledgement, redress and healing of historical trauma unfold over time, especially in transitioning societies.