Search results for ""Author Antjie Krog""

When apartheid ended in 1994, a radiant national optimism suggested a bright future for the new, unified South Africa. But today, even in the midst of a vibrant economy, the cumulative effect of the country's corrosive past-three hundred years of colonialism, the Anglo-Boer War, the displacement, dispossession, and disenfranchisement of millions of people, and the ravages of racism and capitalist exploitation-continues to eat away at what Archbishop Desmond Tutu admiringly called "the Rainbow Nation." Using the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a starting point, acclaimed writer Antjie Krog's essays explore texts from every corner of South Africa in an attempt to remap the borders of her country's communities. In these pages, texts from black women, Afrikaner men, and even comic strips are discussed alongside ideas from African philosophers, an archbishop, and a Nobel Prize winner. Through this extraordinary marriage of academic observation and poetic intervention, Krog endeavors to move South Africa beyond the present moment and toward a new vocabulary of grace and care.

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The first free elections in South Africa's history were held in 1994. Within a year legislation was drafted to create a Truth and Reconcilliation Commission to establish a picture of the gross human rights violations committed between 1960 and 1993. It was to seek the truth and make it known to the public and to prevent these brutal events ever happening again. From 1996 and over the following two years South Africans were exposed almost daily to revelations about their traumatic past. Antije Krog's full account of the Commission's work using the testimonies of the oppressed and oppressors alike is a harrowing and haunting book in which the voices of ordinary people shape the course of history.WINNER OF SOUTH AFRICA'S SUNDAY TIMES ALAN PATON AWARD

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