In the eyes of apartheid’s victims, that is, South Africa’s traumatic history has never been fully integrated into the life of the nation: it is not without reason, therefore, that sections of the public continue to call for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission ‘2.0’. From the perspective of a psychoanalytically inclined psychotherapist, a case can surely be made linking this dissociative amnesia to our propensity for committing and repeating the kinds of acts that are considered heinous by any moral yardstick - all in all, an unconscious attempt to master the original traumas inflicted by colonial and apartheid rule.

I think that my parents would like me to know how they contributed to our freedom. My professional skill and proximity to the primary sources should make telling their story an achievable task. But all my elders were trained in forgetting. Some of this was struggle discipline. Some of it was survival. And then there is the passage of time, decades in which some memories were lost entirely and others faded to the point that they can barely be seen.

The African continent continues to suffer the consequences of linguistic conquest. Political independence may have freed the body, but it certainly did not free the mind. This is the long-term effect of linguistic domination.

The result for Africa is a gigantic disconnect between the educated middle class and the general population, which was always the intention of the colonial enterprise. If you think of languages in terms of war, it was as if the African generals became captives in the enemies’ camp. By generals, I don’t just mean government alone.

The most compelling thing about Mandela is how he endured those years of solitary confinement and other torture without ever surrendering to the racist vampires. In him people see the infinite capacity of the human spirit to resist and to conquer. Do we not for the same reason identify in literature with characters like Prometheus? And in history with people like Paul Robeson, Kwame Nkrumah, Ho Chi Minh, Nat Turner, Toussaint Louverture, Kenyan freedom fighter Dedan Kĩmathi, Zimbabwean resistance leader Mbuya Nehanda, and martyred Chilean poet and singer Víctor Jara?

All these figures are heroic because they reflect more intensely in their individual souls the souls of their community. Their uniqueness is the uniqueness of the historical moment. They make history even as history makes them. They are torches that blaze new paths. Each torch has been lit by the fire of the masses, and every time the flame seems to fade, the great ones turn to their people for more energy.

In the South African system, people see the bitter fruition of at least five forces that have bedeviled the development of human beings: classical colonialism, neocolonialism, slave wages, racism, and the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty through the denial of democracy.

But Black South Africans are not endlessly helpless victims of superior forces. Their history presents a people who have been pioneers in the struggle for communal survival, national liberation, and social emancipation. The ferocity of Black South African resistance blunted the determined efforts of European settlers to annihilate them.