Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver? (review)

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has had an enormous influence on how people think about truth commissions and transitional justice. The Latin American truth commissions that preceded it were viewed as a compromise solution to the problem of how to address demands for a just response to past human rights abuses in a context where prosecution was seen as a potential threat to political stability. South Africa’s TRC broadened the moral and political justifications for truth commissions, arguing that these institutions could contribute to reconciliation, individual healing, and restorative justice. A decade has passed since South Africa’s TRC issued the first five volumes of its final report. Since that time, mountains of articles and books have been written on the TRC. To my knowledge, none of these works has attempted what this book sets out to do, which is to develop a comprehensive empirically grounded response to the question posed in the book’s title: “Did the TRC Deliver?”

In addressing this question, the book brings together a series of excellent contributions from highly respected scholars. All have established reputations as experts on South Africa’s TRC and some worked for organizations that interacted closely with the TRC. Instead of evaluating the TRC in relation to academic definitions of “justice,” “reconciliation,” and “truth,” this book begins by investigating how South Africans, especially those who testified before the TRC, understood the meaning of these concepts. Building on these studies, the book not only develops a powerful critical assessment of the TRC, but also offers an original and nuanced discussion of the theoretical premises that have animated truth commissions more generally. The first part of the book examines survivors’ perspectives on the TRC’s victim hearings with three chapters that analyze a random sample of 429 transcripts. Part Two of the volume evaluates the amnesty process through an analysis of transcripts as well as interviews with a small non-random sample of survivors. The third section analyzes the TRC’s “truth findings,” and a fourth section places the TRC in political context with a chapter on the responses of major political parties and another that analyzes public opinion surveys.

The title of the book promises a clear verdict. For those looking for the short answer, the judgment is negative. Most of the contributors conclude that the TRC did not deliver. The editors move to soften this message, stating that they emphasize problems and limitations of the TRC to counterbalance the influence of uncritical accounts. They maintain that the TRC has been a “valuable and worthy public initiative” that contributed to South Africa’s transition. However, the volume challenges most major empirical claims associated with the TRC and develops a theoretical argument that rejects, and offers an alternative to, the view that truth commissions should be promoted as tools to advance reconciliation, healing, and restorative justice. At the heart of the volume is a vigorous defense of the original mandate of truth commissions, which was to investigate and analyze the causes and consequences of political violence. Truth commissions have become “overloaded” with numerous goals that they are not well-suited to pursue. It is for this reason, the editors of this volume suggest, that the investigations of South Africa’s TRC were so disappointing.

This position is developed in a chapter co-authored by Audrey Chapman and Patrick Ball and is supported by findings and commentary in several other chapters. Chapman and Ball contend that truth commissions are best suited for establishing what they term, “macrotruth,” which involves assessing contexts, and patterns of human rights abuses with a view to identifying structural causes and intellectual authors of political violence.¹ Nearly all truth commissions take this as a central goal. Many also seek to gather evidence on individual cases. However, Chapman and Ball contend that truth commissions are not well-suited for this latter task, which is referred to here as “micro-truth.”

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