The repetition of the nomos of cultural memory in Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom and Mamphela Ramphele's A Life

Abstract

This article points to the repetition of figures of memory in autobiography as a condition of entry into a distinct temporality of ‘worldliness’. The said entry, as the two autobiographies by Nelson Mandela and Mamphela Ramphele show, is distinctly enabled through the signifying time attending the nomadic routes of exile and banishment. As a feature of South Africa’s peculiar versions of personhood, nomadic routes are here symptomatic of strategic repetitions of memoric figures of both tradition and modernity: the eternal return of S.E.K. Mqhayi, the revolutionary poet through the Scarlet Pimpernel antic, among others, in the case of Mandela. Subterfuge during Ramphele’s banishment is similarly managed through the repetition in-between past rhythms of rural sojourn and the Antigone figure.