War in Worcester
Youth and the Apartheid State
Published on 10. October 2012
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-0-8232-4309-9 (ISBN)
Description
The South African government gave no quarter to young people who joined the struggle against the apartheid state; indeed, it targeted them. Security forces meted out cruel treatment to youth who rebelled, incarcerated even the very young under dreadful conditions, and used torture frequently, sometimes over long periods of time. Little is known, however, from the perspective of young fighters themselves about the efforts they made to sustain the momentum of struggle, how that affected and was affected by their other social bonds, and what they achieved in terms of growth and paid in terms of harm. War in Worcester combines a study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)'s findings on the stand taken by South African youth with extended fieldwork undertaken with fourteen young men who, starting in their schooldays, were involved in the struggle in a small town in the Western Cape. Filling a gap in the ethnographic analysis of the role of youth in armed conflict, the book describes, from the perspective of the young fighters themselves, the tactics that young local leaders used and how the state retaliated, young peoples' experiences of pain and loss, the effect on fighters of the extensive use of informers by the state as a weapon of war, and the search for an ethic of survival.
The testimony of these young fighters reveals some limitations of the processes used by the TRC in its search to document the truth. War in Worcester problematizes the use of the term "victim" for the political engagement of young people and calls for attention to patterns of documenting the past and thus to the nature of the archive in recording the character of political forces and the uses of violence. It encourages a fresh analysis of the kinds of revolt being enacted by the young elsewhere in the world, such as North Africa and the Middle East.
The testimony of these young fighters reveals some limitations of the processes used by the TRC in its search to document the truth. War in Worcester problematizes the use of the term "victim" for the political engagement of young people and calls for attention to patterns of documenting the past and thus to the nature of the archive in recording the character of political forces and the uses of violence. It encourages a fresh analysis of the kinds of revolt being enacted by the young elsewhere in the world, such as North Africa and the Middle East.
Reviews / Votes
'War in Worcester' presents the record of struggle in a small town and a description of relationships among young men who examine their experiences of activism retrospectively and microscopically. (-African Studies Review) This devastating yet methodologically restrained account of recollection elicited from black South Africans tortured as children or youth under apartheid, and of the failures of the restitution that followed, achieves an exceptional precision of attention and thought. In attending to the repeated failure of a relation of care for the child, Reynolds reconceives the task of the scholar in relation to government and to the long-term consequences of harm done, and offers powerful reflections on friendship and betrayal, on norms and ethics, and on struggle, its neutralization, and the question of a contemporary politics.----Lawrence Cohen, University of California, Berkeley Reynolds is arguably the most influential writer on youth and political activism today, and she has written a book that does an enormous amount of work as an archival resource. . .---Susan Levine, University of Cape Town, -Journal of Southern African Studies "Throughout the text there is a tone of concern and care towards the participants, the young men who courageously took on the horrors of the apartheid state."----Don Foster, University of Cape Town Reynolds' work with the 14 men has enabled her to examine at close hand the manner in which the instruments of repression and state terror tore into the fabric of one community, its families and its young activists--most of whom were still in school during the last years of the apartheid period.----Andrew Dawes, University of Cape Town "Dramatizing the role of children and recalling the place of violence in the anti-apartheid struggle, Pamela Reynolds also offers luminous evidence of imfobe -- the youthful sense that her protagonists generated both to guide and to understand their acts. For an age that honors only non-violent struggle in the face of oppression, and views youth solely as victims when it acknowledges their distinctive experience at all, this book is doubly thought-provoking."----Samuel Moyn, Columbia University, author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History This is an extra-ordinary book that goes below the surface of master stories of the struggle against the cruel regime through which apartheid was sustained for so long in South Africa. Writing in collaboration with the young who see themselves as engaged in a national struggle for liberation rather than as victims, Pamela Reynolds gives us a book that methodologically innovative, theoretically sophisticated yet able to communicate the everyday realities of those who traversed many layers of relationship with swirling emotions of fidelity, betrayal, joy and grief. This book is indeed a treasure unmatched in its simplicity and integrity.----Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University Here are the voices that South Africa's famous TRC failed to hear - yet they are crucial to understanding how it was the young, on the streets of small townships, who out-fought, out-stayed their government's repression in the 1980s. The reader is offered not just the tortures (the 14 young men are reticent and modest in retrospect) but also their responses to betrayals, and their underlying codes of ethics. Pamela Reynolds involves the reader in her actual fieldwork - its personal dilemmas and doubts, its sensitivities and physical senses; lame academic anthro-speak is not for her. The book ends on a vehement, angry critique of the way the TRC's Report deliberately omitted the young: by refusing to categorise themselves as 'victims', the young were given no recompense for their woundedness and their losses in the struggle. Any serious student of contemporary violence (and the realities of being young combatants against a tough state apparatus) must read this - and take to heart how such studies can, despite the odds and the time required, be really well done.----Murray Last, University College LondonMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
Cloth
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
544 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8232-4309-9 (9780823243099)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Pamela Reynolds is Professor Emerita, Johns Hopkins University, and Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town. Her books include Growing Up in a Divided Society: The Contexts of Childhood in South Africa, Childhood in Crossroads: Cognition and Society in South Africa, Dance Civet Cat: Child Labour in the Zambezi Valley, and Traditional Healers and Childhood in Zimbabwe.