01659nas a2200169   4500000000100000000000100001008004100002653002200043653003600065100001300101700001300114700001300127700001500140245002900155300001000184520129500194       2007                            d10aSouth Africa (ZA)10aRepressive policies (ICH\_1215)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.