Narrating post-Apartheid South Africa (original) (raw)
Related papers
The TRC of South Africa: A dialectical critique of its core concepts
2009
"Despite the length of time that has passed since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC) declared its duties done, it continues to have far-reaching consequences for the understanding and treatment of the issues of forgiveness, justice, memory, truth, and reconciliation within South Africa. This legacy, however, also extends beyond the South African context. Since other such Commissions have sprung up elsewhere in the world, it is imperative that the TRC, currently regarded as paradigmatic in the approach now taken for granted in dealing with post-conflict reconciliation, be thoroughly examined in order that its legacy may prove more positive and expansive. The three aims of my dissertation are: first, critically to examine the underlying assumptions of the TRC's employment and application of the concepts of truth and reconciliation. I assume no originality in engaging in such an examination, but where I do assume originality is in my employment of theorists from the early Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in dealing with both these concepts. Second, I consider the ways in which post-apartheid fictional literature has responded to the notions of truth and reconciliation, with particular focus on whether this response sanctions or challenges the TRC's assumptions. One of the observations I underscore is that there is a sense of challenge that arises out of the autonomy of literature as an artistic medium. Put in the form of a question: do the response of literature to the work of the Commission, and the Commission's engagement with the literary mode, help elucidate the concepts of truth and reconciliation both for the Commission itself and the larger South African community? Third, I examine how the narratives of truth and reconciliation as espoused by the Commission are driven primarily by a religious thrust; a thrust that the Commission uses to its advantage by pointing it back to the South African public as the public's own 'natural' discourse. Through the TRC, religion re-enters the public sphere as normative discourse, thus demanding serious engagement as it now forms part of the discursive narrative on the ethical and moral constitution of the nation."
Screen, 2005
On 21 st March 2003, retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu officially ended the work of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) by handing over the body's final report to President Thabo Mbeki. This date, the anniversary of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, when South African police fired into a crowd of peaceful protesters, was a particularly resonant one for the TRC to conclude its seven-year-long investigation into human rights violations committed during the era of strict racial segregation known as apartheid. Established in a last-minute codicil to the interim constitution that was drafted as part of the multi-party negotiations preceding South Africa's first democratic election in 1994, the TRC heard the testimony of more than 21,000 victims of apartheid-era violence and their relatives in a series of emotionally charged public hearings. In addition to recording the harrowing words of these witnesses to atrocity, commissioners also examined amnesty applications from perpetrators of human rights violations, and sought, more broadly, to promote reconciliation between the races in the new, democratic South Africa. While other institutional innovations such as the final drafting of a new constitution may prove to have a more dramatic impact on South Africa's future, the TRC's hearings were among the most gripping public events of the post-apartheid era. 1 After decades in which a racist regime systematically silenced and brutalized them, victims of violence and their relatives appeared before the TRC in order to express their grief and rage. As a result of this process, the stories of ordinary people brutalized by apartheid were officially recognized and recorded by the new state. The TRC has, as a result, been widely perceived as drafting the first inclusive public history for a democratic South Africa. 2 Not surprisingly, the broad public dissemination of the TRC proceeding by television and film raise particularly thorny aesthetic and
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2003
The article examines the manner in which the imperatives of national unity and reconciliation in South Africa have been pursued at the expense of economic, social and psychological reparation to the majority of South Africans. Notably, the elision of land reform and socioeconomic issues in the negotiation of a transition from apartheid to a non-racial democracy has resulted in the maintenance of an economic system promoting a ''de-racialised insider and a persistently black outsider'' (Bundy, 2000). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), with its restrictive focus only on gross human rights violations from 1960 onwards, contributed towards this process by facilitating a sophisticated amnesia of the greater historical and structural violence of apartheid. Moreover, its use of a hybrid process of testimony based on eliciting personal and juridical ''truth'' to construct its official history, rendered the project of forging a collective memory and identity impossible. Rather, the racialized divides salient during apartheid were taken up, maintained and rewritten in other discourses which performed essentially the same function, that being to maintain a passivity towards addressing exploitative social and economic conditions. Finally, by choosing to focus on trauma narrative and testimony, the TRC utilized the disturbing surplus of unsymbolized trauma experience as the raw material from which to sculpt the official discourses it required to create the New South Africa. A Lacanian-based discourse analysis of survivors' testimonies
Beyond the TRC: Truth, Power, and Representation in South Africa After Transition
Research in Africam Literatures, 2011
Speaking at the Centre for Post-Conflict Justice at Trinity College, Dublin in 2010, Kader Asmal, formerly anti-apartheid activist, recently minister of education, and now professor of law in South Africa, asked the question: APost-Conflict Justice: Industry or Necessity?@ As a critic of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for allegedly sacrificing justice and the criminal prosecution of perpetrators to the ends of national reconciliation (Asmal et al, Reconciliation through Truth), Asmal may have been a controversial choice to inaugurate a centre whose website features Nelson Mandela framed by the new South African flag, and whose members honor the TRC as a key model for the resolution of conflict in Ireland. Nonetheless, the TRC has become, as Paul Gready suggests in The Era of Transitional Justice (hereafter: Era), both an example for later commissions and the stimulus for commentary on an industrial scale.
South Africa: Truth and Reconciliation Commissions
The impact of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa is a contested terrain. On the one hand, it pioneered an entirely new level of national " truth telling " by empowering the victim's voice through public hearings and reparations, and by insisting on accountability for all amnesty applicants by treating them in a uniform manner (regardless of claims of moral high ground). Additionally, it applied a conditional amnesty, robust public hearings, sectorial submissions, and provided intensive national media coverage coupled with investigative services to verify confessions and exhumations to locate missing remains. On the other, there were also multiple deficits attached to the TRC process. Many evaluators assessed the TRC to be ineffectual in reaching the community " grassroots " level masses due to its " top-down " centralized approach, its perceived perpetrator bias, and its unacceptable level of victim compensation. Other critiques pointed to a lack of follow through, limited timeframe and mandate, and its coercive forms of forgiveness and reconciliation. This entry is concerned with the wider societal impact of the TRC 20 years after its inception. Three broad themes will be utilized to frame this entry and to identify future research forays: the contribution of the TRC to public participation processes; the contribution to the construction of a new narrative discourse at a societal level; and the contribution to collective social justice in South Africa today.
2004
Abstract: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was mandated to establish "the truth" about the causes, nature and extent of gross violations of human rights in the country between 1960 and 1994. This article assesses the significance of the TRC for historians and the writing of history in South Africa. There is no doubt that the TRC had shortcomings. Its coverage of human rights violations was uneven. Those who testified at public hearings did not constitute a representative sample of the South African population. The truthfulness of their subjective testimonies was not properly verified. A discursive framework, reinforcing the TRC discourse of reconciliation, was imposed on participants. Because the socio-economic context of human rights violations was neglected, analysis of causation was shallow. The way in which the outcomes of the TRC have been handled by the government seems to endorse Derrida's suggestion that it might become an exercise in...
Critical Discourse Studies, 2009
In the final years of the 20 th and the beginning of the 21 st century, there has been a worldwide tendency to approach conflict resolution from a restorative rather than from a retributive perspective. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), with its principle of 'amnesty for truth' was a turning point. Based on my discursive research of the TRC victim hearings, I would argue that it was on a discursive level in particular that the Truth Commission has exerted/is still exerting a longlasting impact on South African society. In this article, three of these features will be highlighted and illustrated: firstly, the TRC provided a discursive forum for thousands of ordinary citizens. Secondly, by means of testimonies from apartheid victims and perpetrators, the TRC composed an officially recognized archive of the apartheid past. Thirdly, the reconciliation discourse created at the TRC victim hearings formed a template for talking about a traumatic past, and it opened up the debate on reconciliation. By discussing these three features and their social impact, it will become clear that the way in which the apartheid past was remembered at the victim hearings seemed to have been determined, not so much by political concerns, but mainly by social needs.