The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Chapter 6. The Rise and Fall of the Tumult Commission

/ 158 / Chapter 6 The Rise and Fall of the Tumult Commission 6.1.1 In colonial Southern Africa, the Commission of Inquiry would operate much differently than it did in the nineteenth-­ century metropole. Beginning at least with the 1823–­ 35 Commission of Inquiry into the Condition and Treatment of Natives in Southern Africa, the purpose of the Commission of Inquiry was to enable the emergence of colonial government within the unfamiliar political space of the colonial territory. In 1852, the lieutenant governor of Natal appointed a commission to prepare for the“future government of the native tribes”in the district and, to this end, mandated the commissioners to perform a census of natives (registering populations using the names of chiefs), to distinguish between aboriginal natives and emigrating natives, to track the causes for the emigration of natives, to gather information about native chiefs and their powers to better understand native laws, to consider the“expediency of the proposal of removing the natives,” and to look into “the causes of the want of labor, and the remedies applicable to ensure labour.”1 A similar, if more precise, set of questions would be posed in 1878, following Britain’s annexation of the Transvaal: the House of Commons would debate a motion to appoint “a Commission for the whole of South Africa” in order to inquire into “[t]he great question as to what sort of government should be established in South Africa.”2 Although the motion failed (in part because it was thought that the very appointment of a commission would excite the natives and cause unrest), the questions and aims it posed (the problem of polygamy, of native law, of liquor among the natives) would reappear intact first in the 1883 Cape Colonial Commission upon Native Laws and Customs (the recommendations of which resulted in the Transkeian Territories Penal Code) and then again in the mandate of The Rise and Fall of the Tumult Commission / 159 the infamous 1903–­ 5 South African Native Affairs Commission (which, as Chanock rightly notes, simply followed the precedents of earlier Commissions of Inquiry).3 From the very beginning, the Commission of Inquiry in South Africa was not then merely a neutral source of information; it was a technique of governmentality that was deployed as a means to the end of securing and normalizing colonial conquest. Michel Foucault has argued that government precedes the state and that the abstract entity we have become accustomed to casually calling“the state” was only able to come into being under conditions that first were constituted as a problem for governmentality.4 To this must be added: the Commission of Inquiry precedes government. It maps out in advance the sorts of things, goods, and populations whose preservation and equilibriums the sovereign will need to manage, administer, and oversee; it seeks to foresee the problems government might encounter as it undertakes a given program of administration; it examines, in retrospect, the failings and scandals that marked similar attempts to establish government in the past; it poses the questions government will need to answer if it is to achieve its optimal thresholds of credibility and efficiency. Like any liberal practice of governmentality , the Commission of Inquiry fulfills a manifestly critical function: it points out the inapplicability of given models and paradigms to actually existing things and populations; it recapitulates and provides historical narratives of errors in government’s own policies and procedures; it presents and names that which in government is not working well and which can and ought to work better; it is a locus within the state to object to, in order to fine-­ tune, the ways and means of state power. In short, the Commission of Inquiry’s investigations prepare the conditions under which government based on knowledge—­ a government in and by instrumental reason, based on manipulating things and populations to the end of the salus populi—­ could not only come into being but also endure. For the same reasons that indemnity would become more normalized in South Africa than in England, the Commission of Inquiry would become more normalized in the colony too. In modern England as well as in America, Commissions of Inquiry were a technique of liberal governance: they provided a salutary way for government to relate, develop, civilize, and improve the lives of populations (e.g., Native Americans, the illiterate, women , former slaves, prisoners, the working class) who were presumed to be unable to represent themselves in formal institutions of political represen- 160...