01646nas a2200157   4500000000100000008004100001653003600042653002200078100001300100700001300113700001300126700001500139245002900154300001000183520129500193                                       d10aRepressive policies (ICH\_1215)10aSouth Africa (ZA)1 aS. Field1 aS. Field1 aR. Meyer1 aF. Swanson00aSites of memory in Langa  a21-363 aUsing Pierre Nora’s conceptualization of “sites of memory,” this chapter illustrates ways of interweaving heritage conservation practices with people’s lives, stories, and knowledge about sites in their communities. In South Africa, a historical break occurred at the onset of democracy in 1994. During the recent period of democracy there have been various responses to the legacies of the preceding periods of Dutch and English colonialism, segregation, and apartheid. These include the democratic nation-state endeavors to overcome these legacies with processes such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), land restitution, and socioeconomic transformation programs. How do historians, heritage practitioners, and memory workers respond to the past in the present? In Chapter 9, I will argue that when breaks occur as forms of trauma and leave posttraumatic legacies in people’s memories, these cannot be closed off by redemptive reconstructions of history or cured by microhistories that promise healing through oral narration. These legacies are manifested as visual and emotional traces in memory. In the present chapter, drawing on oral histories, I explore how elder residents of Langa narrate the continuities and discontinuities of particular sites of memory.