Memories of home and exile: Narratives of Cameroonian asylum seekers in Johannesburg

It attempts to explore one aspect of the study, which is the way experiences of displacement are reconstructed through memory work. The focus of this article is the critical exploration of how the process of remembrance is fashioned and shaped through the use of metaphors, images and symbols.

Furthermore, it attempts to show how asylum seekers' recollections of the past impacts on their notions of communal existence, their construction of individual and collective identities, their sense of belonging and how it is used to challenge official versions of displaced persons in South Africa. The article poses the following question: How is the past recollected and narrated or how is it buried, suppressed or avoided?