The Future of the Past in South Africa: On the Legacy of the TRC

Daniel Herwitz The Future of the Past in South Africa: On the Legacy of the TRC V O L U M E 5 OF THE SO U TH A F R IC A N TR U TH A N D R E C O N C IL IA T IO N commission report contains a list of all the victims of gross human rights violations whose names appeared in the commission’s database at that time (August 30,1998).' The list is arranged in three columns and is nearly 100 pages long. It is a factual compendium, for the archive, in keeping with a crucial intention of the TRC: to gather evidence of atrocity in the name ofthe nation.1It is also a memorial, not unlike the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. by Maya Lin, whose stark litany of the dead is a chronology of loss reduced to names and years. The list of the victims in the TRC report is not cast in the hard currency of cut masomy like Lin’s memorial, but appears only as ink on paper. Nevertheless, when read as a memorial rather than a mere compilation of facts, and when read as a distillation of the powerful events of the commission, the report takes on an aura akin to that of Lin’s memorial. This is in accord with the religious-biblical character of the TRC, a work of nation-building guided by three men of the cloth— the most famous of whom was Bishop Desmond Tutu who, dressed in his flaming crimson robes and speaking the homilies of divinity before the victims, sternly urged perpetrators to full disclosure and even confession. A report of five volumes whose utopian gesture is to distill truth into reconciliation, suffering into forgiveness, historical strife into national identity, and word into divinity lends that book the aura of a thing of grace to be reverentially held in one’s hands: a bible of contemporary times. social research Vol 72 : No 3 : Fall 2005 531 Consider the name of one person on the TRC’s list of victims: Mr. Ahmed Timol. According to volume 3 of the report: Mr. Ahmed Timol... died in police custody on 27 October 1971 after allegedly committing suicide by jumping from the tenth floor of security police headquarters at John Vorster Square in Johannesburg. Timol had been in deten­ tion for five days. He was the twenty-second person to die in police custody since the introduction of detention with­ out trial. Ahmed Timol’s mother, Ms. Hawa Timol, described to the Commission how she heard about her son’s death: ‘On Wednesday 27th [in the] evening my husband and son had gone to the mosque for evening prayers. During this time three policemen who identified them[selves] as SB [Security Branch] came and entered our house. One of them pushed me into a seat and then proceeded to tell me that my son Ahmed had tried to escape by jumping out of the tenth floor of John Vorster Square and that I was to tell my husband that his body was lying in the Hillbrow government mortuary. I could not believe what was being said and in my confusion, I tried to argue that this was not true . . . . I even remember taking them to the flat windows and saying look how could my son have jumped out of the difficult windows at John Vorster Square’ (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Vol. 3, 542). In fact, Timol had been pushed out of an upper window of the detention center atJohn Vorster Square inJohannesburg, a not unusual practice of the time. It is with the memorialization ofTimol with which I am concerned. To the TRC, the father of Ahmed Timol requested that his son be remembered in these terms: 532 social research As a family what we would like to have, and I am sure many . . . South Africans would like to have, is that their loved ones should never, ever be forgotten___[I]nAhmed’s case a school in his name would be appropriate. But at the end of the day I believe that South Africans in future gener­ ations should never, ever forget those...