| dc.description.abstract | Three distinct vignettes on “Salisbury Island”, have been composed for this
discussion on the tribal college for Indians inaugurated in 1961 on Salisbury
Island, an old naval base at the Durban Harbour. It was prompted by the
reunion that took place in 2011 at the Sibaya Complex outside Durban, as
part of the 50th anniversary commemoration of its inauguration. I present
diverse aspects of life on Salisbury Island, from different, shifting vantage
points and perspectives - combining the banal as well as the critical, rhetorical
and historical, autobiographical and discursive - in order to re-create a lost
world that was experienced during apartheid, the composition “reflects the
syntax of memory itself ” [Hirson 2004:134]. Remembering the past in South
Africa, especially the apartheid past, re-threads both positive and negative
experiences, and weaves a varied quilt of personal, institutional and historical
memory. For history educators this would provide a creative and critical way
of engaging with the past in order to live in the present. | en_US |
