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This article explores transgenerational dynamics of memory in the individual and collective contexts in contemporary South Africa. By engaging in a conversation informed by psychoanalytic theory between the archive of the public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and narratives of the younger generation of black South Africans, the article offers a conceptual framework for how transgenerational transmission of memory in the lives of descendants of generations of victims of prolonged traumatic subjugation might be explained. A tri-directional perspective in which memory crosses and re-crosses past, present and future temporalities is proposed, and the movement and translation of memory between and across these temporalities are explained and conceptualised as a “triadic” view of memory.
Pumla Gobodo‐Madikizela (Mon,) studied this question.