How Embroidery Broke The Silence Around Women’s Apartheid Trauma

PROFESSOR PULENG SEGALO

HOW do we speak trauma? We know from medicine that people embody trauma, beyond words. It shows up in our hearts and our blood pressure, our dreams and our nightmares; we pass it onto our children, and we work it through in arts, spirituality, counselling.

My work has focused on a burning question in South Africa: how did women survive, care for others, and live through the many traumas of apartheid? I was interested in looking for ways to dismantle the polished narratives that circulate and are so often taken as the norm. These narratives speak of healing and forgiveness and of democracy and buried past.

We know the “crisis” was not singular. Under the apartheid regime, many black women lived in underdeveloped areas with no jobs. Many of these women had husbands who lived and worked far away from home. Black women had limited rights, and