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    Translation as Literary Reconciliation: Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali’s Sounds of a Cowhide Drum / Imisindo Yesigubhu Sesikhumba Senkomo

    The 1995 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) intended to “provide a forum for both victims and perpetrators [of apartheid] to share their stories and bear witness to historical harms and injustices in an open, public forum” (Gaertner 446). The terms and expectations for the TRC’s notion of reconciliation, however, do not account for the lasting effects of the legacy of apartheid on contemporary South Africans. More specifically, the TRC does not account for socio-political and cultural reconciliation beyond the proposed reconciliation of the individual victim and perpetrator. It instead provides a temporary but ultimately insufficient method of healing dependent on the closure of a past that cannot and…