Deutsche - Global Balance

At Africa in Motion 2009 we included a number of screenings and events that confront issues
of trauma, conflict and reconciliation. On Saturday 24th October 2009 we hosted an
interdisciplinary Symposium on the Realities and Representations of Reconciliation in Africa.
The symposium aimed to foster discussion and understanding of new research dealing with
the various realities and representations of reconciliation in Africa. A number of recent films,
novels and other forms of art have sought to represent in varying ways the traumas of conflict
and war of the postcolonial African states and the attempts of reconciliation commissions
towards peace, truth, justice and forgiveness.
At the symposium, we touched on the problems and challenges facing artistic
representations of these complex topics as well as the different contexts and consequences
of it in Africa and in its diasporas. A number of high-profile international scholars presented
their work on these topics while Jacqueline Maingard, a senior lecturer at Bristol University
specialising in South African cinema, presented in her keynote address a lucid overview of
TRC films and representations of atrocities in Africa.
Piotr Cieplak’s paper on Rwandan films dealing with the genocide posed difficult questions:
can film represent trauma; is it effective; does it reach the right people’ is it too early to start
using artistic ways to overcome the atrocities in Rwanda? John Masterson continued the
focus with his presentation on Rwandan literature. Cara Moyer discussed South African films
dealing with the TRC like Homecoming and Ubuntu’s Wounds, while Sarah Longair
elaborated on cultural institutions such as the Number Four Prison museum in South Africa
as ways of documenting, commemorating and dealing with the past. Albert Oikelome’s paper
looked at Nigerian hiphop as an art form promoting peace in the Niger Delta region. We also
found out from Tobias Robert Klein about themes of reconciliation in Ghanaian literature, and
Amy Schwatzott expanded on her research of Mozambican art made from recycled weapons.
The combination of the festival and symposium, the artistic and the theoretical, enabled us to
think through representations of atrocities and war, and of brave artistic ways of dealing with
these events and their representations.
The screening of Between Joyce and Remembrance on the evening of the symposium
continued the theme, and informed all the symposium speakers and attendees very directly
of the consequences of the apartheid regime and the effects of the TRC on a family severely
traumatised by the murder of their son by the secret police. As Between Joyce and
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