Speaker: Jonny Steinberg, Professor of African Studies at the University of Oxford.
Chair: Dr Kieran Mitton, KCL.

On 2 April 1992, a police officer was shot to death when he pulled over a pickup truck on the outskirts of the town of Bethlehem in rural South Africa. The pickup was carrying eight members of a self-defence unit aligned to the ANC. This paper takes as its subject one of the men convicted for the crime. I examine both his memory of that day and his quarter-century-long quest to prove his innocence. I argue that not only his memory, but his very self-conception, has been powerfully shaped by his exposure to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and, in particular, to the horribly flawed processes of its Amnesty Committee. The paper thus explores the connection between public processes and private self-making in the context of civil conflict and political transition.

Jonny Steinberg is Professor of African Studies at Oxford University. Among his books are Midlands, The Number, Three-Letter Plague and A Man of Good Hope. Much of his work explores everyday life in the wake of South Africa's transition to democracy.