Silencing the Present

Silencing the Present

Richard Pithouse

In Silencing the Past Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued that when colonial power asserted that enslaved Africans and their descendants in Haiti had no capacity to envisage freedom, or to develop strategies to win freedom and to carry them out, this was based not on any empirical evidence but “an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants”.

The Dignity of the Poor is Vandalized from Many Quarters

by Abahlali baseMjondolo (KwaZulu-Natal), Rural Network (KwaZulu-Natal) & the Unemployed People's Movement (Eastern Cape, Free State & KwaZulu-Natal), Harvard International Review

When black people rose up against apartheid, the government usually said that they couldn’t have organized themselves and that there must have been a white person making them resist. Some thought that only whites were capable of thinking, speaking, and acting for themselves. But it was not only the government that looked for conspiracies every time black people organized themselves. This also happened within the movement.

A review of Jacques Depelchin's, 'Silences in African History: between the syndromes of discovery and abolition'

by Professor Martin Legassick
History Department
University of the Western Cape

The last time I saw Jacques Depelchin I drove him (together with Ibrahim Abdullah) around the townships of Cape Town. We drove along a road bordered by shacks in Khayelitsha and Jacques commented "this is worse than anywhere I have seen in Africa." Some of those shacks were the so-called QQ section of Khayelitsha which, along with a number of areas in the Cape Town metropolis this last winter, rose in revolt at the lack of delivery of services and housing, putting up barricades of burning tyres to close the road that Jacques and I had driven on, and throwing their garbage across the road.

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Reviewed by By Kenneth Maxwell

July/August 1996

Trouillot, a distinguished Haitian scholar who teaches at The Johns Hopkins University, has produced a sparkling interrogation of the past. He examines the suppression of the role of Africans in the Haitian Revolution to demonstrate how power silences certain voices from history. The background is the "war within the war." As Napoleonic France attempted to reestablish imperial control and eventually slavery, black creoles -- natives of the island or the Caribbean -- fought dissident groups composed of Bossales -- African-born ex-slaves mainly from the Congo.