Magister: Silvia Sneidermanis Title: 'The Promise": A family story as a metonymic force for apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Carrying the wounds of apartheid, 'The Promise', 2021 Booker Prize winner, Damon Galgut, depicts the life of a family: Ma, Pa, and three children with alliterative names, Anton, Astrid and Amor. Salome, the character that appears and disappears from the plot can be considered the one the carries these wounds – the maid – ‘she came with the house’. Salome has been working with the family for more than 40 years, and together with her son, Lukas, are the voices of silence, oppression, racism, poverty and neglect. The centrifugal forces of tradition, education, loss, anger, power, displacement, resentment and alienation revolve around all the characters in the novel. There is a promise that prevails in the whole story. Is the promise fulfilled or unfulfilled? Damon Galgut through fiction, recreates the microcosm of a larger social world with actual references of South Africa in its apartheid and post-apartheid period. It is a novel about 4 funerals, each funeral has a time span of ten years. The macrocosm is forty years in South Africa governed by Pieter Botha (Ma’s funeral), Frederik de Klerk, Nelson Mandela (Pa’s funeral), Thabo Mbeki (Astrid’s funeral) and Jacob Zuma (Anton’s funeral). Walter Benjamin, German philosopher and innovator in literary criticism, deconstruction and historiography claims in his famous essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, that the adherents of history clearly and inevitably empathise with the victor. ‘All the rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers’. Benjamin goes on to say that ‘there is no document of civilization which is not, at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such document is not free of barbarism. Barbarism also taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. […] He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain’ (248). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyse, through the novel 'The Promise', how literature ‘brushes history against the grain’. Key Words: post-apartheid, history, promise, neglect, guilt.