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And the news never came

ABSTRACT The motif of ‘news’, which presupposes the advent of something gifted with the power to dishearten, surprise or elevate the receiver, frames the telling of the story of the people I have called fractured souls. Any act of narration, which does not contain a kernel of newsiness, something unexperienced before the telling, is, in my reckoning, not worth the effort. The objective of telling is to change someone’s perceptions of reality; in our case the only reality that is as intimate as breath is the undying hold memory has on our past, present and future. Drawing on my lived experience and using the lives of the communities dislocated by apartheid - from the late 1960s through the unutterably bloody 1980s - I deploy the personal and communal archives of memory to tell my story, a story of how people waited for the news of their liberation. I maintain the curiosity of a child, “to know” the cryptic language of adults that obfuscated the full meaning of what was happening. The brazen display of oppressive power by the state agencies, however, exploded all concealment. Deepening the confusion was the realisation that, even though the depredations against the black masses were borne of apartheid ideology, they were similarly unforgiving towards weaker, poorer whites, bringing into focus the layering of class over race. The story, then, tries to cohere the disparate consciousnesses of these fractured souls and suggests the healing power of communal memory. A memory informed by a dispassionate examination of experience.