Oral History in a Wounded Country: Interactive Interviewing in South Africa

From the director and the deputy-director of the Sinomlando Centre for Oral History and Memory Work in Africa at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Oral History in a Wounded Country is written to show how the cultural, political, socio-economic, and intellectual evolutions that gave birth to South Africa affect the oral history process. It is intended to help practitioners, whether they use oral history as one technique among others to gain a better knowledge of the past or envisage oral history as an academic discipline in its own right, to reflect critically on their practice and find better ways of handling the interview process. The challenge is to appreciate the complexity of South Africa's diverse histories, while being attentive to the dynamics of the interview and their effect on both interviewers' and interviewees' sense of identity.