This is wonderful. African can now write their own history without denialist imperialist pseudo-historians to distort the experience of Africans. For many of the minority who enjoyed the privileges guranteed by state sanctioned pre-1994 Apartheid, they always deny that Apartheid is a crime against humanity. The minorty non-Africans who inflicted endless pain by forcing Africans to adopt non-African names, deprivavtion of facitilies at school and community level, exclusion of Africans from corporate and governmental institutions, usupring of the land through forceful removals and continued demeaning of Africans whenever space allows them, are quick to want to cause confusion by distorting the excprience of the African. The world must be wary of such people who do not want to realise the many achievements that have happened in african-led South Africa. In post-1994 SA many young Africans can now freely pursue their aspirations as Actuaries, pilots, medical specialists, engineers and scientists, own their own businesses, access the once off-limit property market, enjoy their country and be able to vote as free citizens. Of course amaongst the minority who were sole recipients of the Apartheid sanctioned State are not happy with the prosepct of having their precious children being led Africans and having having Africans as those who sign their cheques. hence there's talk of en masse migration to UK and Australia. good riddance. SA doesn't need such filth.
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Digging Up the Dirt
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Distasteful as their work can be, Fullard's team is persevering. So far they've successfully exhumed about 50 burial sites; about half that number of skeletal remains have been positively identified and returned to their relatives for reburial. This has some hoping for new prosecutions, though they've yet to commence. Meanwhile, the government is now building a major DNA lab to advance this work and its legacy. The $57 million research center will offer affordable world-class forensic expertise to other African countries and human-rights investigators. "There are probably far more individuals dying in conflicts in Africa [than elsewhere], yet there's absolutely no infrastructure in place at all for human-rights work at a regional level," says Neal Leat, a forensic scientist at the University of the Western Cape. Officials from Kenya, Burundi and Namibia—where mass graves were discovered last year—have already expressed interest in getting assistance from the new facility, in the hopes it will offer a much more accurate means of addressing their own murky pasts.
For now, however, the task team's focus remains firmly on South Africa's own disappeared. "Partly it's trying to say, these people lived and mattered," says Fullard. "Really, it's about recurring racism even in the field of death—particularly in political conflict. It's about recovering memory and gathering information." Grisly work indeed. But necessary if this country is ever to fully account for the lingering traumas of apartheid.
© 2008
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