Talk

Remembering political atrocities

by Laura A. Siegel

In South Africa, one listened to murderers ask forgiveness for their crimes. In Guatemala, another saw the hidden graves of children. Some have crossed continents to study how horror becomes history. Some have risen -- despite poverty and discrimination -- to positions of power.

Now these remarkable women from around the world are coming together in a Radcliffe symposium, "Political Memory and the Politics of Memory," to discuss how countries can emerge from the aftermath of crisis and create a common history -- a history that can become a springboard for the future.

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela was the only woman on the Human Rights Violations Committee of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was created to help heal the painful memories of apartheid. Now a Radcliffe scholar, she'll be speaking next Tuesday, March 21. The following morning, six other women will gather for the symposium -- including Sheila Sisulu, South Africa's ambassador to the US.

"If memory is going to serve us, it has to teach us lessons for active living," says one of the speakers, South African writer Sindiwe Magona, who lifted herself out of poverty after raising three children alone on a maid's salary. The most important lesson: "We cannot help being involved if we're going to label ourselves human beings."

These issues are at "the center of history," explains architect Rachel Rappaport, another speaker, who has studied the way Germans have dealt with the past in choosing to preserve or destroy certain buildings. Remembering history is very political: "It has to do with who is in power," she says. "Who has a voice. Who will be believed." As an example closer to home, she offers the recent re-examination of Native American history.

Victoria Sanford, who is also attending the symposium, has studied the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans in the early 1980s. She sees common motives among those who study the horrors in Guatemala, South Africa, and Germany -- and those who testify to them. "Survivors come forward to tell the stories of the horrors they suffered, even if it's painful, because they don't just want truth," she says. "They want justice."

Other speakers include Margaret Burnham, who worked as a consultant to the TRC and is now a founding partner of the first Boston law firm headed by black women, and Valerie Yoshimura, who curates photographic and artifactual exhibitions tracing the history of Japanese-Americans.

The Rama Mehta Lecture and the symposium are free and open to the public. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's lecture will take place at 8 p.m. on March 21 at the Agassiz Theatre in Radcliffe Yard, in Cambridge. The symposium will take place at 9:30 a.m. on March 22 in the Cronkhite Graduate Center at 6 Ash Street, in Cambridge. It will be preceded by a continental breakfast at 9 a.m.