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ОглавлениеLOCALIZING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE
The transnational circulation of people and ideas across cultural and geographic contexts has created new situations in which persuasion can occur. Rhetoric happens when rhetors take up arguments and tropes from this global flow to effect change or achieve identification in a particular location or situation. Rhetorical scholars have urged that attention be paid to rhetoric’s now “wider ecology” (Edbauer 9) and to the ways that the “global turn requires a comparative-historical frame and a broader understanding of culture, text, context, and the public sphere than what traditional rhetorical and ethnographic criticism provides” (Hesford 790). Despite these appeals, the field still tends to produce studies of purportedly bounded situations and locales, predominantly in the United States and Europe. For rhetorical scholars to understand late twentieth- and twenty-first-century events, we need to attend to the effects of the convergence of the global and the local that transnationalism makes possible. One way to grasp the rhetorical effects of the transnational “ecology” of rhetoric, particularly in sites beyond the field’s traditional areas of focus, is to study truth commissions.
While the form of the truth commission is now global—countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America have held truth commissions, and currently there are calls for a national truth commission on torture in the United States—that form becomes rhetorically significant when it is used to effect change in a particular place, time, and situation. Analyzing the interplay between the generic form of the truth commission and the specific purposes that are ascribed to it in a given place and time can deepen our understanding of rhetoric in the era of transnationalism. The TRC offers a fruitful site through which to consider the implications of this transnational ecology because it is a site where local, national, and global discourses converged and interacted with the explicit intention of creating South Africa’s new democracy. The participants in the TRC process spoke (or remained silent) as individuals with different sociocultural, political, and religious identifications, as South African citizens invested in the future of a particular nation-state, and as cosmopolitans versed in the global discourse of human rights.
This chapter analyzes the genesis of the South African TRC. One of the unique characteristics of the TRC—its acknowledgment of four different kinds of truth—emerged from the transnational exchange of ideas about how best to deal with a violent past. Scholars and practitioners of transitional justice have criticized the TRC’s “typology of truths” (Posel 155). I return to the specifics of their criticism later in this chapter. For now I want only to emphasize that the Commission’s complex approach to truth emerged not from academe, but from a tense and constraint-laden political context. That it was internally inconsistent and worked at times at cross-purposes is thus not surprising. From a rhetorical perspective, the coherence of the TRC’s approach to truth matters less than the lines of reasoning and possibilities of identification and persuasion that it made possible at a particular moment in time. After briefly reviewing the history of the negotiations that led to South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, this chapter analyzes the contributions of participants at two Justice in Transition conferences that were held prior to the creation of the TRC in February and July of 1994.1 It then describes the TRC’s distinguishing features and the time line of its process to set the stage for the subsequent chapters’ analysis of the agonistic deliberation that the TRC’s varied, and at times contradictory, claims about truth and truth’s effects inspired during its public hearings and in their imaginative receptions.
Negotiating the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy
That the TRC was a response to the particularities of a negotiated transition, not the realization of an abstract theory of truth and reconciliation, helps explain the complexities and contradictions of its mandate and process. Erik Doxtader’s With Faith in the Works of Words provides a richly detailed history of the decade-long series of negotiations that lead to the end of apartheid. In the history that follows, I cover some of the same ground, but with a focus on the ways in which the TRC resulted not only from negotiations within South Africa but also from the insights gained from other nations’ experiments with “dealing with the past” and the influences of global human rights rhetoric. Like Claire Moon, I locate the TRC’s “genesis at the intersection between both global and local narratives” (18). While Moon synthesizes the scholarship of transitional justice to support this assertion, I examine actual South Africans’ uptake of international arguments about transitional justice through an analysis of the transcriptions of two Justice in Transition conferences. Attending to the specific concerns of these conference participants reveals the particular ways in which global arguments about truth, justice, and reconciliation take root and are transformed in a local context.
The challenge of assigning accountability—or granting amnesty—for abuses committed against and in defense of the system of apartheid vexed the earliest phases of the transition.2 It is important to note here that South Africa did not undergo a revolution (De Lange 20). By entering into negotiations with the apartheid government, the African National Congress (ANC) acknowledged the legal framework of apartheid despite its political position regarding the system’s illegitimacy. Tension arising from this acknowledgment permeated the transitional talks and continued throughout the TRC process (De Lange; Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts). The “talk about talks” that initiated the transition began in 1984, when representatives of the National Party (NP), which had held political power continuously since 1948 and was responsible for instituting apartheid, made contact with the still-imprisoned future president, Nelson Mandela. In February 1990, President F. W. De Klerk, a “reformer,” released Mandela, who had spent twenty-seven years in prison as a political prisoner; removed the ban on the ANC as well as other anti-apartheid political parties; and passed the Indemnity Act. The Indemnity Act of 1990 empowered the president to grant indemnity from prosecution if he was “of the opinion that it is necessary for the promotion of peaceful constitutional solutions in South Africa or the unimpeded and efficient administration of justice” (qtd. in Sarkin-Hughes 38). Popular perception was that this first Indemnity Act was targeted primarily at anti-apartheid activists who could not claim immunity (Ntoubandi 156). Negotiations between the NP and the various anti-apartheid parties continued in fits and starts during the two-phased Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) from December 1991 through May 1992. The Boipatong massacre on 17 June 1992 signaled the nadir of the efforts to negotiate; the Bisho massacre on 7 September of that same year served as an impetus to jump-start them. Later that September, the NP and ANC signed a Record of Understanding that laid the basis for the resumption of negotiations after the breakdown of CODESA. Though the Record of Understanding guaranteed the release of an additional five hundred ANC political prisoners, it did not include an amnesty provision for government forces or for members of the white right, who consequently pressured the government to expand the Indemnity Act of 1990. Their efforts led to the passage of the Further Indemnity Act in October 1992. This act allowed for a panel appointed by the president to grant pardons for past abuses in secret hearings and, not surprisingly, was heavily criticized by international observers (Ntoubandi 157). The National Executive Committee of the ANC rejected the legality of the Further Indemnity Act outright, insisting not only “that the truth must be known, that it must be complete, and that it must be officially proclaimed and publicly exposed,” but also that only a democratically elected government should determine the form such truth telling would take (in Boraine, Levy, and Scheffer 139). Later that year, the “sunset clause,” brokered by Communist Party leader Joe Slovo, addressed the ANC’s criticism of the Further Indemnity Act by determining that amnesty would be granted only in exchange for full disclosure. The sunset clause laid the groundwork for the Multi-Party Negotiating Forum (MPNF), which convened on 1 April 1993 to write the interim constitution and create transitional political structures that would facilitate the first democratic election.
The interim constitution, ratified on 18 November 1993, sidestepped the vexed issue of accountability for past abuses and the uncertain legal status of the prior indemnity acts. While it required that some form of amnesty be granted, it mandated that the parliament, soon to be democratically elected, would work out the thorny details. The “postamble” of the interim constitution reads:
In order to advance such reconciliation and reconstruction, amnesty shall be granted in respect of acts, omissions and offences associated with political objectives and committed in the course of the conflicts of the past. To this end, Parliament under this Constitution shall adopt a law determining a firm cut-off date, which shall be a date after 8 October 1990 and before 6 December 1993, and providing for the mechanisms, criteria and procedures, including tribunals, if any, through which such amnesty shall be dealt with at any time after the law has been passed.
The postamble requires some form of amnesty and links it to the general goals of reconciliation and reconstruction, but it does not define “political objective,” establish a cut-off date, or provide any guidelines about the form that the amnesty-granting mechanism should take. Most importantly for my purposes here, the TRC itself “was not mandated or really even imagined within the interim constitution’s post-amble,” as Doxtader emphatically states (241). Following the democratic elections of 1994, the parliament engaged in a series of heated debates about the form of the mechanism that would grant the mandated amnesty. The newly appointed minister of justice, Dullah Omar, proposed the idea of a truth commission. Despite repeated assurances, members of the NP and the white right feared that the proposed truth commission would function as a witch hunt. They argued further that a commission would threaten the fragile reconciliation and deepen political divisions. In part to underscore that the TRC would not be “an Orwellian parody where the search for truth becomes a bludgeon to beat one party’s version of history into the heads of its opponents” (De Klerk qtd. in Boraine and Levy xviii–xix), the proposal was titled the National Unity and Reconciliation Bill. After much debate, in July 1995, President Nelson Mandela signed into law the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, which called for the establishment of the TRC.
The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act tasked the TRC with accomplishing far more than any prior truth commission. In addition to granting amnesty to individual applicants, the Commission was to analyze the “cause, nature and extent” of gross human rights violations that occurred between 1 March 1960 and 10 May 1994, recommend ways to prevent future violations, and restore the human and civil dignity of victims through testimony and recommendations for reparations. According to Alex Boraine, deputy commissioner, the TRC thus proposed “to help create the conditions for a truly new South Africa” (“Truth and Reconciliation” 142). The Commission had a bigger budget, and greater powers of subpoena, search, and seizure, than any truth commission before or since. The TRC also engaged in a “deliberate policy of maximum publicity” (Minow, “Hope” 238). This policy distinguished it from prior truth commissions, the majority of which conducted private investigations and only then produced written reports for public consumption (Hayner, “Same Species” 37). The TRC was intentionally public in multiple senses of the word: official (state-sponsored), transparent in its operations, open to all South Africans who wanted to attend its hearings, and highly publicized. The Commission sought to cultivate citizen participation throughout its process (TRC, Report 1: 53 and 104). It held public hearings for victims, amnesty seekers, and various other sectors (e.g., the media, the judiciary, women) that the general public and the press were encouraged to attend. In addition to these face-to-face public interactions, the Commission’s proceedings circulated widely in a variety of media: “The hearings were aired live on the radio for several hours each day, and videotape clips were replayed on the evening television news. The Truth Commission Special Report, an hour-long Sunday night television show, had the largest audience of all South African news or current affairs shows” (Hayner, Unspeakable 226). The TRC functioned as a “technology of citizenship” (Cruikshank 2), educating and regulating citizens in the capacities and consciousness of liberal democratic governance. To wit, the Report claims that “public participation and scrutiny [by the media] . . . helped the nation to focus on values central to a healthy democracy: transparency, public debate, public participation and criticism” (1: 104). The public hearings, in particular, taught participants and observers how to participate in civic affairs in a manner befitting the new democracy. Chairperson Desmond Tutu’s reminder to participants at one of the public hearings reveals the Commission’s pedagogical intent: “People who may be disagreeing, and may be on all sorts of sides, but one of the things about a new dispensation on all of our democratic and constitutional rights is, is that we have, all of us, points of view which have to be respected” (“Human Rights Hearing”). Finally, the TRC’s positing of reconciliation as a goal and as an outcome of its truth seeking also distinguished it from most prior truth commissions (Hayner, “Same Species” 39).3
The Commission convened in December 1995 and concluded in 2003 with the publication of the last two volumes of the seven-volume Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report.4 Seventeen commissioners, selected so as to represent a range of professions and political parties, headed the TRC’s three primary committees—the Human Rights Violations Committee (HRVC), the Amnesty Committee (AC), and the Reparations and Rehabilitation Committee (RRC). The TRC’s rhetorics shifted over the course of these eight years in response to the participation of different agents, internal and external to the Commission, as well as to the differing goals and priorities of these three committees. During the first stage of the Commission’s development, as the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act was drafted and the Commission was established, a “political sense of reconciliation” dominated, with nation building as its end (A. Du Toit, “Moral Foundations” 130). According to Andre Du Toit, a professor of political science at the University of Cape Town, the work of the HRVC prevailed during the second stage and a “religious and therapeutic sense of reconciliation” through truth telling took precedence (131). The HRVC offered victims of gross human rights violations the opportunity to relate their accounts of these violations. Of the 22,000 victims who gave statements, roughly 2,000 gave their testimony in the committee’s public hearings (Chapman and Van der Merwe 10). As the HRVC hearings concluded, the AC’s concerns became central, with a corresponding shift away from storytelling to fact-finding and legal concerns with due process (Gready 56; Simpson 237–38). During this stage, “quasi-judicial and adversarial procedures” dominated (A. Du Toit, “Moral Foundations” 131). The AC required that individual perpetrators—not bodies, parties, or organizations—submit an application for each gross human rights violation for which they sought amnesty. Applicants had to demonstrate that their violations were politically motivated and that they had fully disclosed their nature and extent. The AC received roughly 7,000 applications, of which 1,793 were heard in its public hearings (Chapman and Van der Merwe 11). The RRC was responsible for making recommendations for reparations for victims. The state ultimately paid only a third of what it recommended—R30,000 (about $450) per victim—and it disregarded the RRC’s other recommendations (Chapman and Van der Merwe 12). The writing of the Report governed the final stage of the Commission’s progress. During this stage, the goal of making “victim and perpetrator findings” took precedence (A. Du Toit, “Moral Foundations” 130–31). In chapters 2, 3, and 4, I explore the distinctive ways in which the HRVC and AC, whose processes were more public than that of the RRC, were to serve the Commission’s goals of truth and reconciliation.
Global Influences on South Africa’s TRC
In form and process, the Commission reflected the priorities and insights of the transnational human rights movement, specifically the global push for truth telling and justice efforts that occurred with increasing frequency in the latter half of the twentieth century. In his foreword to the Commission’s final Report, written at the conclusion of the TRC process, Chairperson Desmond Tutu invoked remembrance of the Holocaust to justify the Commission’s insistence on opening the “wounds” of the past under apartheid: “The past refuses to lie down quietly. It has an uncanny habit of returning to haunt one. ‘Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it’ are the words emblazoned at the entrance to the museum in the former concentration camp of Dachau” (1: 7). Remembrance, Tutu suggests, provides the only way to realize the rallying call of the human rights movement: “Never again!” Indeed, several years before the creation of the TRC, Kader Asmal, in his inaugural lecture as professor of human rights at the University of the Western Cape in May 1992, argued forcefully that a human rights culture would not entrench itself in the newly democratic South Africa without some sort of serious reckoning with apartheid. To support his “ten reasons why the book [on the past] must remain open now and for some time after a settlement has been reached” (“Victims” 494), Asmal referenced the efforts of “other places” (499)—Argentina, Chile, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and “even the United States” (502)—to confront their pasts. Richard Goldstone, now a judge on South Africa’s Constitutional Court, similarly pointed to the instrumental role of the international human rights movement in the struggle to end apartheid to explain his endorsement of the TRC’s creation. He claimed, “South Africa is unique in that it is the only country to achieve change as the result of an international human rights endeavor—and we owe a moral duty to pay our dues [sic]” (in Boraine and Levy 122). Goldstone suggests here that South Africa pay its debt to the international human rights community by adhering to one of its central tenets: the need to document, acknowledge, and publicize human rights abuses. Minister of Justice Dullah Omar argued that truth telling served the government’s broader goal of creating a “human rights culture” in the new South Africa by “entrenching international norms [of documenting human rights abuses] within the framework of South Africa’s domestic jurisdiction” (in Boraine and Levy 2–3). Proponents of the TRC sought to leverage the example set by other countries as well as the dictates of international law to compel South Africa to engage in truth-telling efforts.
Other nations’ experiences with “dealing with the past” in the context of a political transition directly influenced the formation of the TRC. The Justice in Transition institute, founded by Alex Boraine in 1994 in response to the controversy surrounding Dullah Omar’s proposal for a truth commission, played a pivotal role in bringing these international insights to South Africa. The institute hosted a two-stage conference to explore the different ways in which South Africa could confront its history of human rights violations. The first conference, Justice in Transition, took place in February 1994, when, as Richard Goldstone put it, “the idea of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission seemed like a pipe dream,” one that only Alex Boraine had “the faith and confidence to carry through” (in Boraine and Levy 127). This conference “focus[ed] on the experiences of Eastern Europe and Latin America, to give [South Africans] a better appreciation of the complexity and extent of the problem and sharpen our options” (Boraine, Levy, and Scheffer xv). The Institute for Democracy in South Africa website noted that international delegates “from places as varied as Poland, Israel, and El Salvador . . . brought stories and perspective rarely heard in South African discourse.” As José Zalaquett observed in his opening remarks, “a pool of world experiences is contributing to an understanding of the lessons to be learned about justice in the process of transition” (in Boraine, Levy, and Scheffer 8).
The majority of the international delegates stressed that the complexities of political transitions preclude strict adherence to absolute principles; compromises, more than ideological purity, characterize political transitions. Zalaquett advised politicians to remember that “they are dealing with an exercise in maximization, not simple righteousness” (in Boraine, Levy, and Scheffer 9). So while Juan Mendez, an Argentine human rights lawyer, advocated the principle of the “duty to prosecute” (90), other international delegates offered advice about how South Africans could make the constitutionally mandated amnesty more palatable to victims. They especially stressed the need to link amnesty to truth telling, so that amnesty would not descend into amnesia. Adam Michnik, a philosopher and theorist of Poland’s Solidarity movement, lauded a mutual amnesty’s ability to “open up the road to peace,” but he hastened to add that “amnesty is not equivalent to amnesia and thus the past must be carefully written up and remembered” (18). Roberto Canas, a member of the negotiating team that ended the civil war in El Salvador, likewise stressed the importance of truth telling: “For a peace settlement to be solid and durable, it must be based on truth” (54). Here we see the origins of the argument that South Africa’s mandated amnesty, when linked to truth telling through the requirement of full disclosure, could strengthen the new democracy. Indeed, Albie Sachs, a legal academic who served on the national executive of the ANC, reminded the international delegates, “The amnesty is balanced out with the concept of reconciliation and reconstruction. It is not a reconciliation to bury and forget the past . . . it is to assume responsibility for the past and correct the imbalances and injustices” (128). The TRC commissioners would later elaborate on Sachs’s argument, presenting amnesty not as a compromise to be accepted with gritted teeth, but as the grist of reconciliation.
Localizing Global Rhetorics of Truth and Reconciliation
The South African attendees expressed gratitude to the international delegates for sharing their experiences and insights, but they also insisted on the complexity of the South African context. Mary Burton, president of the anti-apartheid organization Black Sash (1986–90) and future TRC commissioner, said, “I have wanted to call out during the conference: ‘Yes, but you don’t quite know what it’s like for us. You don’t understand the complexity of the things in which we are involved’” (in Boraine, Levy, and Scheffer 121). Burton went on to describe the Afrikaner concentration camps of the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) and the psychic effects of that experience on later generations of Afrikaners. Wilmot James, executive director of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, urged attention to the effects of three hundred years of colonialism on social inequalities (134). Others pointed to more recent historical events and factors that would, or should, distinguish South Africa’s efforts to “deal with its past.” Andre Du Toit noted that state violence under apartheid took a different form than it did under South American dictatorships (130–33), while Albie Sachs, in reference to the entirety of the apartheid system, insisted that “anything that caused severe pain on the basis of racial domination must be part of the mandate [of the proposed TRC]” (146). All expressed their newfound appreciation for the “magnitude of the task ahead” (120), describing the conference as a “rich but also confusing, even contradictory, experience. There has been an overload of relevance” (130–31).
After the democratic elections in April 1994, the newly elected parliament began to debate the terms and implications of the postamble, specifically Minister of Justice Dullah Omar’s proposal for a TRC. In July, the Justice in Transition institute held a second conference, the South African Conference on Truth and Reconciliation, “to encourage discussion and debate so that misgivings and misconceptions can be fully dealt with and so that maximum consensus can be reached concerning this extremely important and sensitive proposal” (Boraine, Introduction xxi). Participants at this conference began the process of localizing the insights offered by the international delegates at the first conference by considering their kairos (timeliness) and to prepon (fit) for South Africa. As Kader Asmal stated, “We will be guided, to a greater or lesser extent, by experiences elsewhere. . . . But at the end of the day, what is most important is the nature of our particular political settlement and how best we can consolidate the transition in South Africa” (in Boraine and Levy 27). While the guiding assumptions and final form of the TRC did incorporate the lessons gained from Latin American and Eastern European transitional experiences, they also reflected the unique historical and sociocultural context of South Africa.
Building on the concerns expressed at the first Justice in Transition conference, South Africans at the second conference again questioned whether and how the proposed truth commission could address the particularities of the South African context. The anti-apartheid activist Mamphela Ramphele, now vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, asked whether the language of human rights, such as “crimes against humanity” and “human rights violations,” would adequately encompass the destruction wrought by apartheid or too narrowly define the scope of responsibility for that destruction (in Boraine and Levy 32–36). Ramphele wondered whether it would create a narrow “truth,” one that would exclude many victims from its purview and exculpate those “silent voters who did not stand up and say ‘no!’ loudly enough” (36). While endorsing the proposed truth commission, Willie Esterhuyse, a professor of philosophy, voiced the concerns of many in the white Afrikaner community about South Africa’s adoption of a mechanism that was developed to address the legacy of Latin American dictatorships. Esterhuyse pointed to the factors that, in the eyes of white Afrikaners, distinguished apartheid from those dictatorships—namely, that apartheid took place under a limited democracy and that both the government and “anti-apartheid” activists committed atrocities (31). Esterhuyse further noted that the Roman Catholic influence in Latin America made “confessions and repentance semi-public affairs,” whereas in South Africa the guiding principle is “confess your sins privately and live accordingly” (31). Finally, he suggested that the “ugly face of truth” might threaten the fragile reconciliatory process already under way (32). Esterhuyse concluded his remarks by again endorsing the proposal for a TRC while cautioning that its architects should include “a cross-section of interest groups” (32).
Other South African participants sought to localize the human rights rhetoric, particularly the imperative to document and acknowledge past wrongs. They drew connections between the absence of truth telling about events in South Africa’s past and social relations in the present. Antjie Krog followed Mary Burton in referencing the abuses suffered by Afrikaners in the concentration camps, but she did so to endorse Omar’s proposal for a truth commission. Presenting a counter-factual, she suggested that the lack of recognition of the Afrikaners’ “intrinsic humanity” and “equality,” evidenced first by their imprisonment in concentration camps and then again by the absence of truth telling about their suffering, contributed to the inhumane mindset of apartheid: “Wasn’t the mere fact that the abuses of the [Anglo-Boer] war were never exposed perhaps not a key factor in the character that formulated apartheid’s laws? . . . Perhaps if compensation had been experienced not only in material terms but also through the recognition of the intrinsic humanity and equality of all inhabitants then South Africa’s history would have looked different (in Boraine and Levy 112–13). Had the English acknowledged the extent of their wrongdoing, Krog suggests, perhaps the Afrikaners would have been less likely to imagine and enforce the dehumanizing system of apartheid. Febe Potgeiter, deputy secretary-general of the African National Congress Youth League, considered the implications of Krog’s argument for South Africa’s future by linking analysis of the abuses of the more recent apartheid past to the creation of a different culture for the “new” South Africa. He observed, “In the process of identifying where boundaries have been over-stepped, we will be redefining our common understanding of a human rights culture” (23). In his response to the South African attendees, Dullah Omar echoed Krog’s and Potgeiter’s understanding, asserting that “the proposed commission should be seen as part of the attempt to build a new society” (130). Despite some misgivings, then, the South African conferees generally agreed that the proposed truth commission’s critical and moral inquiries into the past would serve the goals of the new South Africa.
Prior truth commissions, along the lines advocated by Ignatieff and Steiner, had sought the most basic form of truth: a “record of who did what to whom and when” (Steiner 16). The TRC, in contrast, acknowledged truth’s inherent rhetoricity by acknowledging and theorizing four kinds of truth: forensic, social, narrative, and healing. With the exception of forensic truth, the Commission’s four-pronged typology recognized the role of human perception and language in the production and effects of truth claims. Participants at the South African Conference on Truth and Reconciliation first introduced the notion of multiple truths. Albie Sachs distinguished “microscopic” truth (“factual, verifiable and can be documented and proved”) from “dialogic” truth (“the truth of experience that is established through interaction, discussion, and debate”), and he argued that the latter should be the TRC’s “primary concern” (in Boraine and Levy 103). Sachs’s “microscopic” truth became, in the language of the TRC, “forensic or factual truth,” which encompassed “the familiar legal or scientific notion of bringing to light factual, corroborated evidence, of obtaining accurate information through reliable (impartial, objective) procedures” (TRC, Report 1: 111). The Amnesty Committee’s quasi-juridical function made it rely most heavily on this form of truth. The TRC’s notion of “social or dialogic” truth echoed Sachs’s language almost exactly. The final Report defines it as “the truth experience that is established through interaction, discussion, and debate” (1: 113–14). The TRC’s public process facilitated the making of “social truth.”
At the same conference, Antjie Krog presaged the TRC’s notion of “narrative” truth. She pleaded for the proposed truth commission to allow for the “uninterrupted telling of experiences as perceived by the victims” (in Boraine and Levy 116). The TRC heard Krog’s plea. “Narrative truth” informed the “victim-centered approach” of the HRVC, wherein deponents had the “right to tell their stories of suffering and struggle” (TRC, Report 1: 53). According to the Report, “narrative truth” coincided with the “value [that] continues to be attached to oral tradition” in South Africa (1: 112–13). Through the extensive use of simultaneous interpretation, the TRC also heeded Krog’s proposal that it record these stories “with respect to the individual’s language, vocabulary, accent and rhythm” (in Boraine and Levy 116).
The fourth truth, “healing and restorative truth,” furthered the Commission’s goal of reconciliation as well as its attempt to foster a culture of human rights. The Report explains that “[healing truth] places facts and what they mean within the context of human relationships—both amongst citizens and between the state and its citizens—[and] contributes to the reparation of the damage inflicted in the past and to the prevention of the recurrence of serious abuses in the future” (1: 114). Healing truth worked in tandem with the Commission’s embrace of ubuntu, a Nguni term typically translated as “humanness.”5 In the section entitled “Ubuntu: Promoting Restorative Justice,” the TRC Report defines ubuntu as a “traditional African value” that “expresses itself metaphorically in umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu—‘people are people through other people’” (1: 127). Nosisi Mpolweni of the Xhosa department of the University of the Western Cape describes the social relationships that lie at the heart of ubuntu: “The African kind of interconnectedness . . . opens up all the time, it broadens. First we take care of the person next to us, then it opens up to the family, you share, then it grows to the community. Whatever we do, we don’t do it alone” (Krog, Mpolweni, and Ratele 202). In her explanation of the term, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, former TRC commissioner and now a professor of psychology at the University of Cape Town, similarly emphasizes the roots of ubuntu in African culture and its role in repairing and sustaining relationships. She states, “The emphasis of ubuntu is on social relationships that are based on cooperation for the good of the community. Ubuntu is part of the deep cultural heritage of African people” (Gobodo-Madikizela 163).
There are ongoing debates about whether ubuntu is, in fact, part of Africans’ “deep cultural heritage.” In his memoir No Future Without Forgiveness, TRC Chairperson Desmond Tutu claims that it is consistent with the “African Weltanschauung” in which “harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony for us [Africans] is the summum bonum—the greatest good” (31). Like Tutu, South African theologian Reverend Wesley Mabuza, director of the Institute for Contextual Theology, states that there is “a strong link between their religious understanding of reconciliation and their African cultural roots” (qtd. in Van der Merwe 2). Mabuza asserts that ubuntu stems from the “African mind”: “I need to say that this idea that there is secular on one side and religious on the other is a western approach. For us it is an ubuntu situation. Whether you are religious or not, what is the human thing to do in this situation? From the African mind I would have problems with this demarcation” (qtd. in Van der Merwe 2). Mark Sanders argues that ubuntu, defined as “an African ethos of reciprocity,” guided the HRVC hearings by positioning the Commission as a sympathetic substitute for those perpetrators who would not claim responsibility for the human rights violations about which victims testified (9). In so doing, he argues, the TRC “generalized perpetratorship and reparative agency” (9). Other scholars, however, tend to view claims about ubuntu’s indigeneity and pervasiveness among African peoples with a great deal of skepticism. Yianna Liatsos suggests that ubuntu was promoted and cultivated by the TRC commissioners to “affirm an organic affinity between ‘African ways’ and the Christian message of forgiveness and redemption that Tutu and the Act advocated for post-apartheid South Africa” (“Keeping Faith”). Drawing on his research in urban black South African communities that maintain strongly retributive and violent justice practices, Richard Wilson claims that “[ubuntu] became the Africanist wrapping used to sell a reconciliatory version of human rights talk to black South Africans” (13).
Whatever its origins, appeals to ubuntu did appear in the earliest phases of South Africa’s transition from apartheid and continued to appear well after the conclusion of the TRC process. The 1993 Interim Constitution and the preamble of the National Unity and Reconciliation Act both contain the following oft-cited statement about what the new South Africa would require: “There is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization.” Ubuntu was a key feature of Chairperson Tutu’s rhetoric during the TRC public hearings, and, as mentioned previously, “Ubuntu: Promoting Restorative Justice” is the title of a section of the final Report. The Report goes so far as to suggest that “a spontaneous call has arisen among sections of the population for a return to ubuntu” (1: 127), a claim it supports by quoting the testimony of Susan van der Merwe, whose husband allegedly died at the hands of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. In her testimony excerpted in the Report, Van der Merwe references ubuntu as the source of her belief that “every person’s life is too precious” (1: 128). The Report’s strategic excerpt supports the TRC’s claim about both the ubiquity and indigeneity of ubuntu in South Africa. It also underscores its nonracialism—Van der Merwe’s whiteness does not prevent her from affirming this “African” concept. The final Report also cites the statement of Cynthia Ngewu, whose son was among the “Gugulethu Seven” killed by the police in 1986: “We do not want to return the evil that perpetrators committed to the nation. We want to demonstrate humaneness towards them, so that they in turn may restore their own humanity” (5: 367). These presumably unsolicited statements of ubuntu provide support for the Report’s assertion that South Africans concurred with its understanding that there was a “need for ubuntu but not for victimization” (Republic of South Africa). The commissioners undoubtedly used ubuntu as a rhetorical resource to explain and justify “healing” truth and its relationship to the goal of reconciliation. But once the term ubuntu circulated, participants and critics of the TRC defined it in their own ways. For my purposes here, the authenticity or origins of ubuntu matter less than its function as a topos, or place of argument, for participants in and respondents to the TRC process.
The TRC’s truth typology produced a tangled knot more than a seamless weave. Criticism of what historian Deborah Posel calls the Commission’s “wobbly, poorly constructed conceptual grid” of truths abounds (155). Some argue that the TRC’s major dilemmas resulted from the fact that “the two processes—quasi-judicial fact-finding versus victim-centered storytelling—were fundamentally irreconcilable, and for a simple reason: different kinds of truth were at stake” (Simpson 238). Anthony Holiday argues similarly: “The former set of [forensic] facts served the interests of the TRC’s truth-gathering task, while the latter [psychological] set, once bared in public, would be grist to the mill of national reconciliation” (54). Still others argue that the TRC never intended for the truths to cohere. To wit, Daniel Herwitz proposes that the Commission’s typology was instrumental, “operat[ing] as a homily throughout the proceedings” so as to facilitate the movement from truth to reconciliation (16). More recently, Paul Gready, while generally laudatory of the TRC framework (56), has cautioned against the embrace of a “banal post-modern” conception of truth that does not “confront and refute” obviously untrue narratives and perspectives (73). Gready notes that “simply mapping contradictory truths potentially enriches difference,” and he chastises “writers and critics” who, consciously or not, provide “ammunition” for such an approach (71, 73). Gready writes primarily for scholars and practitioners of transitional justice and human rights. He seeks to draw general insights from the South African experience about the usefulness of truth commissions as a transitional justice mechanism.
My aim in the following chapters is not to judge the consistency or coherence of the TRC’s truth typology—the job of the philosopher or historian. Nor is it to evaluate the typology’s usefulness as a tool of reconciliation—the job of a scholar or practitioner of transitional justice. My interest instead lies in the ways in which the Commission’s engagement with different kinds of truth, as well as its claims about truth’s varied effects, generated contestation in the public hearings and spawned a range of imaginative receptions of the TRC process. A cultural rhetoric approach that reads across genres is able to capture this ecology of truth claims, as it occurs at the interstices of, and traverses, institutional, political, and cultural realms. The imaginative texts that I examine do not offer ambiguous postmodern conceptions of truth but rather make pointed arguments about the limitations, strengths, and unanticipated effects of the Commission’s process and arguments. Because the HRVC and AC emphasized different kinds of truth and made different arguments about the effects of those truths on TRC participants and South African society at large, I address their work in different chapters. The HRVC, whose work dominated the first year and a half of the TRC process, prioritized narrative truth and suggested that it would culminate in a healing truth for individuals and those who bore witness to their stories. To this claim, captured in the slogan “speaking is healing,” I now turn.
