Performing South Africa's Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (review)

Whereas South African apartheid supplies historical shorthand for national "processes" that assert the state through violent ideological repression — including centuries of colonial rule — truth commissions offer another kind of process that again intends to advance the futurity of the state. The logics of truth commissions shift state narratives from the domain of repressive (police, prisons) to affirmative powers (public and state-funded testimony, radio, television). In this important book, Catherine Cole wisely observes that commissions still "grapple with the ultimate failure of traditional jurisprudence in the face of contending demands for justice, reparation, acknowledgement, mourning, healing, reconciliation, and the promulgation of public memory" (x). Truth commissions can only attempt to write the future of the past.

Cole examines the transitional justice process in South Africa as a performance practice that treats the lived and felt impossibilities of truth and reconciliation as the ongoing labors of post-apartheid time. Cole finds in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) theatrical and performative protocols of jurisprudence that stage manage court-like arenas of speech and hearing. She shows how the TRC makes use of public testimony and "the popular" for the purposes of reinventing the authority and stability of the state and of society in the complicated and polyglossic processes of "transition." The TRC's deliberately public dramaturgy "embraced performance — that is, embodied enactment before an audience — as a central feature of its operations" (xii). Cole describes the fascinating TRC hearings, which began in April 1996, as an epic production designed to study 34 years of state offenses (1960-1994).

Chapter 1, "Spectacles of Legality: Performance, Transitional Justice, and the Law," argues that the TRC produced the "antithesis" of previous (apartheid) censorship practices by highlighting the gathering of information, multiracial publics, and an acknowledgement of previously silenced and silencing repressions, including torture (6). One in ten human rights violations were chosen for TRC hearings and Cole suggests the commission usually took an eight-week cycle to visit communities, "taking the process to the people" (8). Likening the commission to a traveling theatre show, Cole observes that, "the deponents — the victims themselves — had substantial agency. They could say what they wanted when they got in front of the audience" (10), sometimes prompting Archbishop Desmond Tutu's efforts to reign in its "theatre" of horrors, with the curative urgency of Christian healing processes. Asking who, finally, the commission serves, Cole reviews questions about the problems of witness testimony that recounts and reenacts trauma, and then details performative subversions of the testimonial form: the use of sound, for instance, and especially the practice of wailing, to defy the making of testimony into the "usable pasts" of mere record, or legal facts.

Chapter 2, "Justice in Transition: Political Trials, 1956-1964," surveys three key trials to establish a genealogy of critical performance practices in South Africa's legal history: The Treason Trial (1956-61), a 1962 proceeding against Nelson Mandela, and the 1964 Rivonia Trial. Referencing but not addressing a culture and history of South African orality (and African orature), Cole observes in each successive case the uses of spectacle, the rhetorical effects of Mandela's costumes, and Mandela's refusal to give testimony or submit to cross examination in the Rivonia Trial in favor of giving a speech from the dock where he could speak without interruption (54). Chapter 3, "Witnessing and Interpreting Testimony: Live, Present, Public, and Speaking in Many Tongues," passionately argues for "a radical revision" of TRC scholarship: for more humanistic interpretations of human rights testimony "that honors the complexity of the interpretive process" and "looks for truths embedded in testimony that run counter to the commission's mandate" (90). Cole notes that "very few South Africans have ever learned what the commission found out. The TRC's archives, which were intended to be open to all, have been locked away," and she estimates that 95 percent of the archival holdings remain unavailable (123).

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