It is a sad irony that while South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process has been widely studied and used as a resource internationally, and while South Africa’s remarkable post-apartheid Constitution guarantees rights to its citizens that are radical in their scope, life on the ground in the ‘Rainbow Nation’ is, for the majority of its citizens, (still) characterized by high rates of poverty, morbidity and violence. Marking the failure of the promise offered by a post-apartheid era in a poignant way is the fact that, fifteen years after the end of apartheid, in May 2008, the army was called out...

With the transition from the apartheid rule to democratic government in 1994 came the hope, both within and outside South Africa, that ‘the time when humanity will be restored across the face of society’ had come (Coetzee 1986:35). Yet Coetzee’s first post-apartheid novel,Disgrace(1999), set in South Africa, is remarkably bleak. As Derek Attridge has remarked,Disgrace’s negative portrayal of the relations between communities, coming from an author widely read in South Africa and internationally, can be seen as a hindrance to, not a support of, the massive task of reconciliation and rebuilding that the country has undertaken. Touching...

Coetzee’s texts illustrate the instrumentalism with which the discourse of humanitarianism produces women and non-human animals asnecessarilyvulnerable. South Africa’s TRC, I suggest in this chapter, is analogously complicit in producing children as instruments of post-apartheid nation-building. This instrumentalism is occluded in a spectacular narrativization of youth that produces them simultaneously as helpless and innocent victims of the apartheid stateandas subjects all the more remarkable for the agency they express in their participation in the anti-apartheid struggle. The spectacular rendition of children as helpless victims, as we shall see, predates the TRC. Texts of the apartheid struggle...

So far, I have investigated what is marked as human and inhuman behaviour through the (shifting) discourses used to demarcate the difference between human and non-human animals. I have also explored the ways in which the imposition of gender roles, overwritten in the convention of acknowledging adolescent activists as having ‘given up’ their childhood, or identifying adolescents who have had traumatic experiences and/or little care as having had ‘no’ childhood, can have traumatic effects in and of itself. These effects, I have argued, are disguised, rather than made visible, in the division of subjects into categories of perpetrator or victim,...

I have addressed the roles that concepts of non-human animals, children, women and, specifically, abused women, play in determining the actual living conditions of these subjects in terms of their relationships with their immediate families, their communities, the state, the public, and their negotiation of their own identities within these complex networks. Now I wish to turn to the question of male agency in the current post-apartheid era. If I had concluded with the last chapter, my project would risk implying that masculine agency in South Africa is not only essentially violent, but overwhelmingly powerful. In this chapter I would...

Since the institution of their finalized democratic Constitution in 1996, South Africans of all walks of life and in all places have been flooded with workshops that were established with the goal of educating citizens to ‘Know Your Rights’. Driving this approach is the notion that citizens have rights of all kinds that the state should support, and that the state is capable of supporting these rights to the degree necessary to assure them. The citizen’s responsibility is to remind the state ofitsresponsibility to protect the citizen, in an interesting transference – interesting for the breadth of its scope...