Genocide, Memory Work and the Falsehood of Human Rights in Postapartheid South Africa

From Sharpeville on 21 March 1960 through the Soweto Uprising on 16 June 1976 to the Marikana massacre of workers on 16 August 2012, the ghost of state-sanctioned genocide haunts South Africa’s history. This chapter looks at ways in which liberal language and liberal discourses, especially around human rights, have been historically deployed to exorcise the country’s nationalist narratives of this ghost. The chapter proceeds from the irony of celebrating Human Rights Day on 21 March every year since 1994 while tacitly ignoring the Sharpeville Massacre and the continued racialised inequalities it gestures to. The chapter is located in anticolonial theoretical frameworks that include decolonial and black studies approaches, and partly argues that commemorations such as Human Rights Day are part of the memory work in the construction of nationhood. The chapter uses the two cases of the Sharpeville and Marikana massacres. A literature review is conducted on material published on these two cases focusing on the articulations of memory work and nationalism. Selective memory work has made it possible to rationalise, trivialise and ignore racialised inequalities and ‘black pain’ in the postapartheid moment.