Verne Harris delivers the Alan Paton Lecture 2011

Head of the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Memory Programme, Verne Harris, delivered the 18th Alan Paton Lecture on May 5, 2011. He will be speaking on the subject “Madiba, Memory and the Work of Justice”.

In his conclusion to the lecture Harris asks:

Has our post apartheid memory work been too superficial? Have we only scratched the surface of our country’s pain and alienation? Does the really hard work – the work which truly embraces damage and offers healing – remain to be done? To what extent are the failures of the post-apartheid project failures of memory? I think you know by now what my necessarily tentative and preliminary answers are. What to do about it, I think, is the critical issue. Here time has allowed me only the posing of what are, I think, key questions, the key ‘how’ questions: How can we avoid the pitfalls of deploying memory work to the service of metanarrative? How can we open the metanarratives we have adopted, unavoidably have adopted, to problematisation and deconstruction? How best to break down our cultures of opacity? How do we enable the decolonisation of our memory institutions? How do we tend the place of bruise, of wound, of damage? How do we create conditions for healing, without prescription, without blueprint? How do we rescue the post-apartheid reconciliation project? How do we befriend the mistakes of our pasts? How do we grow up as a nation? How do we learn to live without Madiba?

See the full text of the lecture, attached below.

Source: Nelson Mandela Foundation website

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