The Truth Commission and Postapartheid Literature in South Africa

From the beginning, it was clear that South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) would be different from the cold, bureaucratic, and mostly in camera proceedings of similar bodies in Chile and other nations in transition from authoritarian regimes. Rather than issuing blanket indemnity to the agents of state terror, as in Chile, amnesty in South Africa was granted on an individual basis to those who gave "full disclosure" of politically motivated crimes. Thus amnesty was used as a tool for excavating the truth about the past.

Moreover, South Africa's Truth Commission attempted to balance the perpetrator-oriented nature of the amnesty proceedings with a Human Rights Violation (HRV) Commission that heard stories from survivors and families of the victims of apartheid-era political violence. The victim hearings were decidedly nonjudicial, involving no cross-examination of testimony, and were intended to provide a safe space for some victims of human rights violations to have their accounts of the past made part of the official record. Indeed, two of the principal goals of the TRC were "establishing as complete a picture as possible of the causes, nature and extent of the gross violations of human rights" committed within a thirty-four-year period from 1960 to 1994 (Justice in Transition 5-6), and compiling a report of the Commission's findings and conclusions. Wilhelm Verwoerd argues that the TRC was largely successful in its efforts "to expose as much truth as possible about those [human rights] violations that tend to be cloaked in denials and would otherwise, in all likelihood, have remained obscured from the public eye. Through the public testimonies of so many victims and the more or less full disclosures by those responsible for gross violations of human rights at amnesty hearings, the powerful 'conspiracy of silence,' the temptation to forget [. . .] has been seriously challenged" (160).

The TRC was designed to at least lay the groundwork for reconciliation between the agents and supporters of the former white minority regime and the opponents of apartheid. As the banner hanging at every hearing proclaimed, Truth is the "Road to Reconciliation." This formulation was perhaps overly optimistic, as the task of determining the "Truth" about the past based on thousands of conflicting testimonies is a hopelessly muddled enterprise that nevertheless requires the commissioners to make absolute determinations of guilt and responsibility. Sometimes the rhetoric of the Truth Commission minimizes this uncomfortable demand by emphasizing the need to present multiple perspectives and versions. In his foreword to the Final Report, for example, former Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Chairperson of the Commission, refers to the past as a "jigsaw puzzle" of which the TRC is only a piece, and alludes to a search "for the clues that lead, endlessly, to a truth that will, in the very nature of things, never be fully revealed" (TRC Final Report 4) .

The pluralistic rhetoric used here and elsewhere by Truth Commission proponents runs directly counter to the more rigid, absolute, and legalistic standards of Truth operative in the Amnesty Committee's work. For example, when the commissioners decide that an applicant has made full disclosure and is therefore eligible for amnesty, they accept the perpetrator's version of events, even when it directly contradicts the evidence given by his victims. Writing the Final Report likewise required the commissioners to make determinations of guilt and responsibility at both individual and collective levels. Thus, for all of the TRC's rhetoric of reconciliation and restoration, its processes inevitably throw the victims' accounts of the past into conflict with the accounts given by the perpetrators themselves. The political need for amnesty and the humanitarian need for reform and restoration appear to be contradictory, perhaps even mutually exclusive, and the Commission has therefore given birth to a crisis of public memory and collective agency. That is, to the extent that the victim hearings have failed to balance the perpetrator...