This text deals with the ways in which silence, and the grammar of silence, as a way of dealing with trauma, is determined by the historical conditions where it is embedded. One of the registers in which this silence operates has to do with a particular micro-politics of social research and knowledge production in South Africa that separates “testimonies” of war and “victims” (or sources of knowledge) from “trauma experts” in ways that reinstate a series of hierarchies. In this context, academic credentials, the language of exchange, and the implementation of non-collaborative research agendas are of great importance to understand the one-directionality of knowledge production about violence.