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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION: THE RHETORICITY OF TRUTH COMMISSIONS
In April 1994—after forty-five years of institutionalized white supremacy, which left lasting and deep scars—nearly twenty million South Africans participated in the country’s first truly democratic elections. Nelson Mandela, a political prisoner for twenty-seven years, won the elections in a landslide, becoming South Africa’s first black president. This dramatic transition to democracy, captured by photographs of snaking lines of voters, guaranteed that South Africa would occupy the world’s spotlight. The creation of a new democracy did not in itself erase the history of violence. Through a public and participatory process, the new government created a number of mechanisms for dealing with the past, one of which, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), has received the lion’s share of attention. South Africa’s interim constitution guaranteed some form of “conditional amnesty” for those who had committed human rights abuses in defense of and in opposition to apartheid. It did not, however, specify the nature of the body that would grant those amnesties. The TRC emerged as a “third way” (Boraine, “Truth and Reconciliation”), an alternative to either Nuremberg-style prosecutions or a blanket amnesty. The TRC’s architects drew on the insights of international human rights actors as well as South African nationals (Goodman). Though a vexed endeavor in ways that From Apartheid to Democracy examines, the TRC nevertheless played a crucial role in South Africa’s transition from apartheid.
Truth commissions are an inherently rhetorical and now ubiquitous mechanism for “dealing with the past.”1 They constitute a novel genre of “public persuasion” in that they seek to “advance a cause” or “overcome an impasse” (Zarefsky 30)—typically involving a political transition—by redressing past wrongs through mechanisms such as truth telling, amnesty, and reparations. While they date from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, truth commissions echo the earliest rhetoricians’ faith in the ability of speech to create community and dispel violence. Indeed, they seem motivated by an Isocratean insight: “Since there is innate in us the ability to persuade each other and to reveal to ourselves the things we wish, not only have we put off the life of wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities; we have established laws and discovered arts, and for nearly all the things we have contrived, logos had been our fellow worker” (Nicocles, § 6). Truth commissions marshal logos, our “fellow worker,” to facilitate a political transition in a variety of ways. They might do so by gathering information for concurrent or future prosecutions; by producing an account of past violations in the hopes of “closing the book”; by showcasing, via a commission’s historical inquiry and process, the new government’s commitment to transparency, human rights, and the “rule of law”; or, in the case of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, by promoting a national discourse of reconciliation. While the specific goals and mechanisms of truth commissions vary, all (1) exist only temporarily, (2) investigate a defined time period in the recent past, (3) focus on gross violations of human rights as defined by humanitarian law, (4) place a high value on listening to victims, and, finally, (5) submit a final report that accounts for their activities and findings.
Attempts to address a legacy of human rights violations date back to the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following the Second World War. The emergent field of transitional justice finds its origins in these postwar experiments in justice. Its practitioners assume that “confronting the past” is a necessary component of a successful transition from authoritarian rule to democracy or from a period of conflict to peace and stability (Bickford, “Transitional Justice” 1045). Because transitional justice “confronts the past” in order to promote justice and to facilitate a transition, its practitioners consider a range of mechanisms in addition to traditional prosecutions. As Bickford notes, these include reparations policies, reconciliation initiatives, institutional reforms, and, of course, truth commissions (1046).
Truth commissions lie at the nexus of debates about how to balance competing demands for truth, justice, and reconciliation. Contingent conditions—a new and fragile government, the threat of a return to violence if prosecutions are an option, and the lack of a strong judicial system—can make retributive justice measures, such as prosecutions, unfeasible. These pragmatic concerns often lead to the decision to hold a truth commission. At a minimum, a truth commission serves to increase public awareness of the abuses committed during the time period covered by its mandate. In some instances, it can illuminate facts about abuses that the former regime kept hidden from the majority of the population. In many cases, however, a truth commission simply acknowledges the truth of abuses that were widely known by the majority of the population but actively denied by the government. Citizens in a repressive environment often fear the consequences of speaking publicly about abuses or are legally prevented from doing so by gag orders. The fear of attracting attention and becoming a victim oneself, and official policies that discourage or ban truth telling, generates what Yael Danieli calls a “conspiracy of silence” (qtd. in Hayner, Unspeakable 135). A truth commission breaks the silence. Ideally, it heralds the transition to a new political order by acknowledging the government’s responsibility for or complicity in the abuses. The president emeritus of the Open Society Institute, Aryeh Neier, suggests that a truth commission’s “acknowledgment implies that the state has admitted its misdeeds and recognized that it was wrong” (34). This official acknowledgment ostensibly enables the new government to gain the trust of citizens who have lost confidence in political institutions and processes. In so doing, the truth commission helps draw a line between the past and the present. For these reasons, some practitioners and human rights activists now consider truth commissions a helpful counterpart to, though not necessarily a substitute for, traditional prosecutions.
Pragmatism alone, though, has not fueled the surge of truth commissions in the last thirty years. In some instances, human rights activists and academics contend, truth commissions might better serve the needs of victims and societies transitioning from a period of violence or mass atrocity, even when prosecutions are possible. As legal scholar Martha Minow observes, “litigation is not an ideal form of social action” (“Hope” 238). Trials can retraumatize victims who must share their experiences in an adversarial context. They tend not to promote truth telling on the part of perpetrators who, out of self-protection, seek to obscure the details of their past. Finally, given their aim of attaining an individual verdict of guilt or innocence, trials do not typically produce a compelling picture of the myriad individuals, practices, and ideologies that created the enabling conditions for and context of abuse. Truth commissions, proponents suggest, instead address victims’ desire to tell their stories and generate a historical narrative about the recent past that acknowledges human rights abuses. By creating a safe space wherein victims can testify about their experiences, they meet what Priscilla Hayner describes as a “very basic need by victims to recount their stories of violence and survival” (Unspeakable 136). Legal and narrative theorist Teresa Godwin Phelps suggests that the distinctive setting provided by a truth commission can “allow for fuller transformative and constitutive storytelling beyond the scope of any trial” (67). During a trial, perpetrators testify, but they provide only the facts that will serve their case. A truth commission has the power to establish broader parameters for perpetrators’ testimony, furthering the potential for the “transformative storytelling” to which Phelps refers. South Africa’s TRC distinguished itself from prior truth commissions through its individualized amnesty program, which encouraged perpetrators as well as victims to tell their stories. Following the TRC’s example, several subsequent truth commissions have incorporated perpetrators’ storytelling into their mandates.
The hybrid form and multiple goals of truth commissions make them prime targets of criticism. Truth commissions generate “genre confusion” precisely because they are “an imperfectly realized hybrid genre, spanning the state inquiry, human rights report, and official history” (Gready 20). According to their critics, truth commissions either do too little, or, more frequently, seek to do too much; that is, they set goals that they either should not or simply cannot realize. On practical grounds, some argue that truth commissions should limit themselves to fact-finding, rather than interpretation or evaluation. Doing so, these critics suggest, would enable a commission to frame its investigations and findings as objectively as possible, thus promoting consensus around its findings regarding human rights violations. José Zalaquett, a human rights activist and commissioner on the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, for example, suggests that truth commissions “should concentrate largely on facts, which may be proved, whereas differences about historical interpretation will always exist” (qtd. in Maier 265). Public intellectual and politician Michael Ignatieff similarly argues that “all that a truth commission can achieve is to reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse,” that it “can only winnow out the solid core of facts upon which society’s arguments with itself should be conducted” (“Articles” 113). Legal scholar Henry Steiner posits, echoing Ignatieff,
[p]erhaps truth commissions should have this same attitude, holding to the role of truth-tellers in the flat sense of doing their best to record who did what to whom and when, period. Were they characteristically to engage in social analysis, by identifying structural phenomena underlying violations, and by proposing deep changes in a society’s socio-economic organization, they risk being viewed as but another voice in a world of disputed opinions and theories about justice, development, whatever. Their reports might lose distinctiveness and a sense of objectivity by being absorbed into the broad play of political ideas and historical debate. (16)
Steiner, like Zalaquett and Ignatieff, proposes that truth commissions not engage what rhetoricians recognize as the stases: arguments at the level of value, cause and consequence, and procedure and proposal.
On intellectual grounds, some scholars doubt a truth commission’s ability to negotiate the competing demands of politics and scholarly inquiry. Charles S. Maier lauds a truth commission’s ability to gather the raw material of a dark period of history, but he argues that it is ill equipped to engage in the historian’s craft of “moral sifting” (268): “Historians, I believe, will have to use this material, but integrate it into a different framework” (273). Indeed, historians Mahmood Mamdani, Colin Bundy, and Alexander Neville attribute what they characterize as South Africa’s truth commission’s “compromised historical account” to the compromised nature of the political transition itself. Meanwhile, philosophers tend either to identify the logical fallacies in the ideology of truth commissions, which they attribute to its “public and political purposes” (Holiday 56), or to impose coherence and consistency onto that ideology. For example, Daniel Herwitz attributes a philosophical coherence to the TRC’s “epistemic regime” that glosses over its significant and unresolved contradictions (41). Psychologists are dubious about the healing effects of truth commissions. They observe that truth telling in the context of a truth commission might serve some victims’ desire to share their stories and the nation’s need for a fuller account of the abuses of the past, but does not address the deeper psychological effects of trauma. Whether in praise or blame, these scholars apply academic criteria to the work of truth commissions.
Rhetoricity of Truth Commissions
These varied critiques simultaneously highlight and disavow the inherent and inevitable rhetoricity of truth commissions. Truth commissions are neither the unsullied brainchild of theorists nor the polished machine of technocrats. They are rhetorical experiments, real-world efforts to enact change in the uncertain realm of contingent human affairs via our primary medium of exchange: language. Because truth commissions are mandated to investigate contested narratives, and, in some instances, to promote reconciliation among adversaries, they must negotiate the demands of multiple publics—a rhetorical process that involves fostering complex and ever-changing networks of identification among stakeholders. While a truth commission’s mandate sets it in motion, it does not fully control participants’ inquiries into the meaning of the past and its bearing on the present and future. No matter a truth commission’s ideological imperatives and maxims—“revealing is healing” or “let it out”—individual victims and perpetrators find ways to mold the commission’s process to suit their needs and to tell the stories they feel need to be told. The commission’s rhetoric becomes an inventional resource, not a determinant of participants’ arguments about the past. Truth commissions also provide a window onto the relationship between language and subject-formation. When participants speak before a truth commission, we witness the dynamic exchange between their pretransitional ways of knowing and being and those made available by the truth commission and the new democracy. The tension between these participants’ and the commission’s notions of what aspects of the past should be remembered, and how, makes the public hearing a particularly dynamic site for rhetorical analysis.
Acknowledging that truth commissions are live and motivated rhetorical events that occur at a particular moment in time and place, and that they aim to create both a productive “truth” about the past and democratic subjects, reframes practitioners’ and academics’ critiques. A rhetorician assumes that however narrow a truth commission’s mandate, it will inevitably grapple with arguments occurring at different levels of stasis: What happened in the years covered by the mandate? What caused those events to take place? What value should be assigned to those events and the actors behind them? And what, if anything, should be done in the present to redress identified wrongs and injustices? From a rhetorical perspective, then, attempts to distinguish “facts” (Ignatieff) and “truth-telling” (Steiner) from “social analysis” are untenable. Truth telling, even in a “flat sense” (Steiner), is inevitably an assertion of value and cause because the statement occurs in language. Consider, for example, the differences between two statements that might plausibly appear in a truth commission’s final report: “Activists killed civilians during the armed phase of the anti-apartheid struggle” vs. “Militants murdered civilians during the armed phase of the anti-apartheid struggle.”2 South African poet and journalist Antjie Krog pointed to the inescapable rhetoricity of language and the challenges that rhetoricity poses for a so-called truth commission when the idea of a South African TRC was first proposed. Krog asked, “Must the commission be called a ‘truth commission’? I am not trying to smuggle in confusion here but want to stress the ambiguity of language: it signifies more than a mere dictionary explanation. To examine the question allows one to recognize the complexities of dealing with the world. I feel it would be presumptuous and naïve to set up a commission and claim it could find and tell ‘The Truth’” (in Boraine and Levy 116–17). Even when truth commissions limit their intended goals to fact-finding, they place themselves in the realm of analysis and interpretation. The mandate of a truth commission prioritizes the investigation and acknowledgment of certain “truths” over others. These choices reflect its architects’ “opinions and theories” about ethical and philosophical issues regarding truth, justice, and “the good.” A commission’s chosen focus also calls attention to, or diverts attention from, the “structural phenomena underlying violations.” By exclusion or inclusion, then, a commission necessarily engages in the “play of political ideas and historical debate” (Steiner). More importantly, the commission sets the stage for the participants in its process to do the same.
The architects of the TRC hoped that its work would be invitational, relational, and quite literally world making. In his introduction to the TRC-founding act, Minister of Justice Dullah Omar described the future commission as facilitating the construction of “the historic bridge of which the Constitution speaks.” According to Omar, this metaphorical bridge would help transport South Africans from “the past of a deeply divided society . . . towards a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy, and peaceful co-existence” (Republic of South Africa). The TRC’s highly public process, a feature that distinguished it from prior truth commissions, was to play a crucial role in the construction of this “bridge” (Hayner, “Same Species” 37). As Erik Doxtader explains, “the TRC was envisaged as a public good, a transparent and inclusive body whose work was to be guided by a norm of publicity, an expectation that speech would help open democracy’s commons and build collective interest from old divisions” (With Faith 257).3 The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act charged the TRC not only with the historical task of depicting the “causes, nature, and extent” of the human rights violations that occurred during a particular time period, but also with gathering the “motives and perspectives” of victims and perpetrators through investigations and hearings. This situation of contingent truth seeking calls to mind the Sophistic emphasis on the role of human perception as the primary source of knowledge, on the significance of speaking before others, and, finally, on the necessity of group deliberation (Jarratt xviii). The architects of the Commission hoped that victims’ and perpetrators’ narratives and their “public acknowledgement” by the Commission would “restore the dignity of victims and afford perpetrators the opportunity to come to terms with their own past” as well as foster an “understanding of our divided pasts” (TRC, Report 1:49). Consciously or not, they operated on the rhetorical faith that the language elicited by the TRC would have material effects; it would transform not only the individual participants in the TRC process but also the South African society that bore witness to them. The TRC’s attempt to create a public for the new nation—one comprising individual citizens engaged in reasoning about the significance of South Africa’s recent past—reveals much about the relationship of language practices and the formation of publics.
From Apartheid to Democracy conceives of the South African TRC as a rhetorical event in three specific senses of the term “rhetorical,” none of which precludes the others. First, the TRC was premised on arguments about the dunamis (power, potential) of language as described above—rhetoric as constitutive. Second, the Commission’s architects, and subsequently the Commission itself, sought to persuade various publics of language’s transformative effects so as to stave off calls for other forms of dealing with the past and to facilitate South Africa’s (relatively) nonviolent transition—rhetoric as persuasion. Third, and most centrally for this project, the TRC sought to generate “public debate, public participation and criticism” (TRC, Report 1: 104)—rhetoric as argument. A rhetorical approach to the TRC yields an intriguing set of questions: How does a truth commission promote identification amid competing truth claims and arguments occurring at different points of stasis? In a civic setting that is premised on the sharing of personal stories, what relates and separates the rhetorics of the civic and the personal? How do the dynamics between the participants in a truth commission process, and the constraints produced by their ideological and sociohistorical contexts, construct this novel rhetorical situation? Which of the Commission’s arguments did different South African publics seek to contest, and how did these publics voice their counterarguments within the public hearings? Finally, how did this argumentation continue both beyond and outside of the Commission’s formal process in genres not typically perceived as rhetorical, such as the novel and the photographic essay?
From Apartheid to Democracy joins a lively scholarly conversation about the TRC. Some studies of the Commission use empirical methods, employing “rigorous and systematic social science methods” (Gibson 3) or “more comprehensive and scientific assessment” (Chapman and Van der Merwe viii), to determine whether the TRC was a success. As their titles imply, Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? (Gibson) and the edited collection Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver? (Chapman and Van der Merwe) exemplify this vein of scholarship.4 These empirical studies do a certain kind of work, but a rhetorical mode of analysis is especially suitable for a rhetorical situation. From Apartheid to Democracy’s rhetorical approach answers the question of the TRC’s “success” by arguing that the Commission provoked contentious debate and thus contributed to the creation of an agonistic deliberative public sphere. Here I draw both on political theorist Leigh A. Payne’s claim that “contentious debate enhances democratic practices by provoking political participation, contestation, and competition” (3) and on rhetorician Patricia Roberts-Miller’s positive valuation of agonistic over irenic deliberation. In contrast to irenic deliberation, which strives toward consensus and thus has the tendency to stifle disagreement and critical perspectives, agonistic deliberation “raises interesting questions, brings up injustices, or draws attention to points of view that had been obscured” (Miller 12). In the absence of absolute knowledge of the good, just, or right—that is, in the world of contingent human affairs as opposed to that of certain a priori truths—agonistic deliberation creates the optimal conditions in which to think through issues and determine courses of action.5
While From Apartheid to Democracy argues that agonistic deliberation characterized the TRC process, the Commission itself had both irenic and agonistic aims. The very title of its establishing Act, “Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation,” suggests its irenic impetus (while also betraying its humility about the possibility of achieving that aim through the use of the word “promotion”). At the same time, the Commission encouraged “public participation and scrutiny . . . [to help] the nation to focus on values central to a healthy democracy: transparency, public debate, public participation and criticism” (TRC, Report 1: 104). As Claire Moon demonstrates, a tension existed “between the homogenizing discourse of national unity and reconciliation, on the one hand, and the pluralizing process of the TRC on the other” (8, emphasis in original). While Moon focuses on the Commission’s production of that “homogenizing discourse,” I show how its public process created openings and opportunities to subvert its irenic aims and deliberate agonistically: participants and respondents challenged the TRC’s assumptions, called attention to its omissions and blind spots, and insisted that it recognize perspectives on the past that emphasized difference, especially concerning race. Thus while the TRC might be deemed a failure because empirical surveys demonstrate that South Africans are not fully reconciled, or that they feel that the “truth” of the past still eludes them,6 it was generative in that its very failure to achieve these idealistic goals provoked valuable contestation in its public hearings and in their literary and photographic receptions long after its official process had concluded.
In its insistence that agonistic contestation characterized the TRC’s public hearings and continued in their imaginative reception, From Apartheid to Democracy parts company with scholars who argue that the Commission allowed only certain statements while precluding others. For example, philosopher Daniel Herwitz, echoing historians Deborah Posel and Colin Bundy, claims that “the terms of the commission constrained the possibility and appropriateness of victim (and perpetrator) testimony, so that were one unable to abide by them, one would have to bow out of the proceedings altogether” (40). Herwitz suggests that the Commission’s “epistemic regime” was so powerful that victims and perpetrators whose perspectives on the past did not align with its reconciliatory agenda would voluntarily exclude themselves from its process (41). Drawing on a rhetorician’s sensitivity to the productive and interpretive art of a range of argumentative modes and genres, I show how contestation, though not always explicit or verbal, characterized both the public hearings and the creative work that responded to them. From Apartheid to Democracy builds on the work of scholars who show how the TRC’s public process enabled participants to influence its direction and outcomes. While Sanders examines how the TRC “altered its course in response to the testimony that it led” (9), and Goodman and Cole analyze the emotional and community-building effects of the Commission’s performative dimensions, I focus on the hearings and their imaginative reception as forums of contentious debate that enriched and deepened the truth and reconciliation process that the TRC set in motion. This agonistic contestation did not subvert or thwart the Commission’s aim of constructing a bridge toward “a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy, and peaceful co-existence,” but rather signaled movement in that direction (Republic of South Africa).
In addition to adding this fine-grained rhetorical analysis of the agonistic deliberation that the Commission provoked to interdisciplinary scholarship on the TRC, From Apartheid to Democracy contributes to the growing body of rhetorical scholarship on South Africa. Philippe Salazar, Thomas Moriarty, and Erik Doxtader have already made the case that the new South Africa should occupy a central place in the “imagined global geography” (Hesford 788) of twenty-first-century rhetoric and composition studies. While these scholars focus on a range of spheres, political figures, and historical phases of the transition from apartheid to democracy, their interests converge on the ways in which South Africans came to accept the norms of new South Africa, namely, the valuing of deliberation, rather than violence, as a means to resolve conflict. In An African Athens, Philippe Salazar calls the post-apartheid South Africa “a signal terrain for rhetoric studies” (ix) and compares it to classical Athens, noting that in each site “the contest of words is a matter of national interest” (xviii–xix). He claims that the rhetorical nature of the transition “imbued [South Africans] with a sense of the inner dignity—the ethos—of deliberation as a human right, or deliberation as the fundamental right that gives shape to other rights” (165) and analyzes the post-apartheid government’s attempt to create a rhetorical culture thus distinguished by its valuing of deliberation in “the search for a common denominator” (165). Thomas A. Moriarty’s Finding the Words similarly calls attention to the creation of a deliberative culture in post-apartheid South Africa, though he focuses more narrowly on the role of South African political leaders in forging it. Moriarty argues that they “moved the country out of the realm of violent conflict and into the realm of rhetorical conflict” (4). He shows how their rhetorical constructions fostered the belief that negotiations and electoral politics are “the method for resolving differences and achieving social and political change in the country” (11). Finally, Erik Doxtader’s With Faith in the Works of Words: The Beginnings of Reconciliation in South Africa, 1985–1995 excavates the roots of this novel rhetorical culture by tracing the history and rhetorical purchase of the term “reconciliation” before the advent of democracy. Doxtader’s history explains why, in South Africa, reconciliation is best understood as “a call to speak and the calling of speech . . . a practice of exchanging words in the name of fostering interaction and composing relationships that do not rest on the necessity of violence” (286). Thus defined, the rhetoric of reconciliation creates opportunities for identification and persuasion and also fosters the rhetorical culture that Salazar, Moriarty, and Doxtader describe, rather than marking its achievement.
From Apartheid to Democracy likewise argues that the valuing of rhetorical deliberation in post-apartheid South Africa places it in the center of twenty-first-century rhetorical studies. The task at hand, however, is to examine the contested terms and values that emerged from the new nation’s “search for a common denominator” (Salazar 165). Richard Marback’s Managing Vulnerability: South Africa’s Struggle for a Democratic Rhetoric, which I was delighted to read as I was preparing this manuscript for publication, complicates these earlier studies’ discussion of the deliberative culture of the new South Africa. Marback rightly observes that democratic participation requires not only a high degree of inclusion but also a “sensitivity to vulnerabilities,” so that “democratic citizens come to share the burden and risk of belonging” (10). Marback’s investigation of the reciprocal relations of vulnerability and sovereignty complements my analysis of the persistence of dissent in post-apartheid South Africa. From Apartheid to Democracy tracks the TRC’s elaboration of arguments about truth and reconciliation, and participants’ and artists’ responses to those arguments, to show how the Commission’s irenic impetus toward “national unity and reconciliation” was troubled at various axes of struggle, especially race and gender.
Chapter Overview
Chapter 1 sets the stage for this analysis. In it, I analyze the proceedings of two Justice in Transition conferences to reveal the interplay of national and international arguments about truth telling that led to the particular form and distinctive rhetorics of the South African TRC. While the Commission’s focus and goals evolved over the duration of its existence, certain of its key claims, what Paul Gready calls the TRC’s “meta-message” (71)—namely, those concerning the healing power of speaking one’s truth, the accountability of individual perpetrators, and the desirability of reconciliation—circulated with enough coherence and consistency to provoke the critical receptions that the subsequent chapters examine. From Apartheid to Democracy focuses on these highly publicized receptions of the Commission’s meta-messages by oft-cited victims and notorious perpetrators—so publicized, in fact, that their TRC hearings generated imaginative responses.
Chapters 2 through 4 exemplify the argument that the TRC’s public dimensions—in the dual sense of the hearings being open to the public and of their subsequent uptake and circulation—generated agonistic deliberation that began in the TRC hearings and continued in their imaginative receptions. Each of these chapters focuses on a particular topos (place of argument) that the TRC introduced into circulation: accountability, speech and silence, and reconciliation. I understand topoi to be “bioregions of discourse” that become recognizable as topoi when they function as inventional resources for rhetors (Eberly 6). My analysis travels across time, space, and genre, following various lines of reasoning. I first examine each topos as it was established by the TRC. I then note how it sprouted in its travels from the TRC mandate to the commissioners’ statements during the public hearings and finally to the Report. I examine varied receptions of the Commission’s process that stem from these topoi, including those of participants in the public hearings and select literary and photographic texts that represent or explicitly reference the TRC process. These receptions contribute to the “cultural conversation” about South Africa’s past that the TRC helped to instigate (Mailloux 54). My method is inspired by that of anthropologist Fiona Ross, who “trac[es] the shifts of interpretation, the processes of social reworking, [and] the grounds of acceptance on which narratives come to rest” (102). Unlike Ross, who studied the reception of women’s TRC testimonies in their hometowns and the effects of this reception on their everyday lives, I track the evolution of these topoi from the public hearings into a range of imaginative texts. These “imaginative combinations” provide insights and make arguments that were difficult to express during the public hearings due to the rhetorical and ideological constraints of the TRC process (Ndebele, “Memory, Metaphor” 21).
Chapter 2, “Ambivalent Speech, Resonant Silences,” interrogates the assumptions about speech, dignity, and selfhood that informed the hearings of the TRC’s Human Rights Violations Committee, and, more specifically, the special women’s hearings that the TRC held to counter the silence of women victims of apartheid-era violence. How did women survivors of sexual violations challenge the TRC’s assumptions about their needs and healing process, best exemplified by the TRC’s maxim “revealing is healing”? After tracing the ideological origins of the Commission’s approach, I examine the experience of one woman deponent, Thandi Shezi, with the TRC. I then follow the arguments around the topos of speech and silence into Achmat Dangor’s novel, Bitter Fruit (2001), which shows how, contra the TRC’s logic, a woman’s decision to maintain a public silence can simultaneously facilitate and reflect her growing independence and sense of agency. This chapter challenges the logic of human rights discourse and the Western rhetorical tradition, both of which equate discourse and the speaking subject with power and presence.
Chapter 3, “Contesting Accountability,” examines the conflict between the Commission and anti-apartheid activists’ ways of framing the past and determining accountability. I outline the historical and ideological origins of the TRC’s unwillingness to address the effects of apartheid’s systemic racism and its concomitant focus on the individual perpetrator. I then ask how black perpetrators, in particular, responded to the constraints imposed by the Commission’s liberal, and thus race-blind, ideology. To answer this question, I analyze the testimonies of two well-known and controversial figures, former Umkhonto we Sizwe7 soldier Robert McBride and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s former wife. I then follow arguments around the topos of accountability into Njabulo Ndebele’s novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003). This chapter demonstrates how and why the TRC’s approach conflicted with anti-apartheid activists’ understanding of the collective struggle to end apartheid.
Chapter 4, “Imagining Reconciliation,” examines TRC participants’ visual and verbal arguments around the topos of reconciliation as they appear in Jillian Edelstein’s photographic essay, Truth and Lies: Stories from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (2001). As in the previous chapters, I begin with an analysis of the Commission’s complex, and at times contradictory, arguments about reconciliation, focusing particularly on its linking of reconciliation to democratic praxis. I then show how the individuals whose portraits and testimonies appear in Edelstein’s Truth and Lies complicate the TRC’s vision by differently “imagining” both the process of reconciliation and the nature of democratic relations in the new South Africa that the TRC sought to create (Asen 351). Drawing on Robert Asen’s understanding of the “collective imaginary” as a source of “topics of discussion” (351), and Barbie Zelizer’s argument that images invite speculation by “activat[ing] impulses about how the ‘world might be’ rather than how ‘it is’” (164), I suggest that Edelstein’s photographs function rhetorically by inviting speculation about the emergence of democratic norms and the possibilities for coexistence in the new South Africa. Truth and Lies thus showcases rhetoric’s function as an art of invention “capable of creating new versions of the real and the valuable” (Atwill 206). Finally, the conclusion considers the methodological implications of my study by further elaborating on the importance of reading across genres in politically contentious situations.
