From Apartheid to Democracy: Deliberating Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa by Katherine Elizabeth Mack (review)

With its unprecedented public participation and openness, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) captured and continues to hold international attention. In addition to scholarly research, it has inspired numerous creative works and has served as a model for numerous subsequent truth commissions. In From Apartheid to Democracy: Deliberating Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, Katherine Elizabeth Mack brings these scholarly and creative conversations together to contribute a fresh, perceptive, and clear rhetorical perspective on the fiercely contested question of the TRC’s success. As Mack convincingly demonstrates, truth commissions are inherently rhetorical. They are founded on a belief in the transformative and world-making capacity of rhetoric.

Mack’s rhetorical perspective allows her to comfortably set aside the desire— which has fixated many scholars—to provide definitive definitions of the TRC’s titular abstractions “truth” and “reconciliation.” She pursues instead the “lines of reasoning and possibilities of identification and persuasion” the TRC made possible at particular moments in time by tracking its arguments about truth and reconciliation, as well as their uptake by participants and artists (16). Mack engages directly with the TRC’s web of complexities and contradictions, a feature that has challenged and provoked criticism from many scholars, and deftly argues it is central to the TRC’s success. While more systematic empirical surveys suggest the TRC was a failure because South Africans are not wholly reconciled or still do not fully know the “truth” of the past, Mack argues “it was generative in that its very failure to achieve these idealistic goals provoked valuable contestation in its public hearings and in their literary and photographic receptions long after its official process had concluded,” contributing to the creation of a healthy agonistic public sphere (10).

In chapter 1 Mack analyzes the convergence of global and local rhetorics in the transcripts of two Justice in Transition conferences convened in South Africa before the TRC. Mack recognizes the transnational human rights movement’s influence on the TRC’s terms of creation, while situating it within the political and social context of South Africa in transition from apartheid to democracy. The TRC’s approach to truth and reconciliation, Mack explains, was inconsistent and shifted over time in response to various actors, constraints, and purposes. In the subsequent chapters, Mack demonstrates how these complexities and contradictions generated productive contestation by tracing the evolution of particular topoi—speech and silence, accountability, and reconciliation—from the TRC’s public hearings into a range of what she terms “imaginative texts” (13). Although Mack never explicitly defines an “imaginative text,” she indicates in the conclusion that these texts are not simply works of nonfiction but “genre-bending texts” that challenge the oppositions, such as fiction versus nonfiction or novel versus history, that underlie traditional categorizations of genres and modes of address (126–27). From Apartheid to Democracy makes an important and compelling argument for the study of these texts, not only in scholarship on truth commissions specifically but in all rhetorical studies of civic deliberation.

Mack addresses the topos of speech and silence in chapter 2. Through an analysis of the experience of Thandi Shezi, a survivor of sexual violence who testified in the TRC’s Special Hearings on Women, and Achmat Dangor’s novel Bitter Fruit, Mack illustrates how participants complicated the TRC’s assumptions about the relationship between speech, selfhood, and dignity and demonstrated the rhetorical significance and resonance of silence. Truth commissions and much rhetorical scholarship, according to Mack, “mistakenly assume speech necessarily or always dignifies.” Instead, Mack argues, “What can and should be translated into words depends on the context, the nature of the audience, and one’s own integration and understanding of the experience being remembered” (59).

In chapter 3 Mack turns to the topos of accountability in the TRC’s hearings for perpetrators. The South African TRC was distinctive from previous commissions due to its power to grant...