Narrating post-Apartheid South Africa (original) (raw)

Whatever its critics have had to say about its role and effectiveness, the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) -set up by the National Unity and Reconciliation Act -has exercised an incalculable influence on political, social and cultural forms in the post-apartheid period. There are those who would question whether the society can, even yet, be described as "post-apartheid" but it is nevertheless true that an extensive range of cultural activity has produced a number of attempts to generate a new set of discourses in narrative forms which are designed to create a radically different political imaginary in the country. As many commentators have noted, the predominant discursive medium of the TRC was a set of complex, multiple and contested narratives in which conflicting voices, hidden and silenced for many years, for the first time made a bid for a symbolic presence in a social order which had denied their existence for so long. Although the TRC involved a significant amount of empirical enquiry and expert, in-depth investigation, what figured most prominently in its public manifestations at different venues throughout the country, and on television and radio, were, mostly, individual and community narratives of violence, humiliation and exclusion brought about by the social division of the political grammar of Afrikaner hegemony. As Michael Ignatieff has argued, truth commissions can and do change the frame of public discourse and public memory but how long it might take to change the affective and material base of a society is another issue.