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16 Theatres of Truth, Acts of Reconciliation: The TRC in South Africa Catherine M. Cole The cataclysmic changes South Africa has experienced in the past decade have riveted the world. Many expected with the formal ending of apartheid in the mid-1990s that the tinderbox created by a racist state, gross economic exploitation , and a decades-long history of human rights abuses would ignite into civil con®agration. Although South Africa now has one of the highest crime rates in the world, it has not, contrary to expectation, exploded into civil warfare. One of the instruments of post-apartheid healing, or at least a vehicle for exposing the magnitude of apartheid’s trauma, was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Though the TRC was ®awed and partial—an incomplete mixture of courtroom procedure, Christian ritual, and media blitz—the Commission did nevertheless facilitate a necessary and profound process. It functioned as an instrument of psychological healing, a tribunal of public reckoning , a juridical mechanism for granting amnesty, and a symbol of the need for reparation. The Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, heard testimony by victims who had endured tremendous suffering simultaneous with admissions of guilt by apartheid’s worst perpetrators, some of whom were granted amnesty through the TRC. These hearings—held on stages, in front of live and television audiences, and broadcast throughout the country—are an extraordinary example of the theatricalization of traumatic memory on a national scale. The TRC has been described as “exemplary civic theatre, a public hearing of private griefs which are absorbed into the body politic as a part of the deeper understanding of how the society arrived at its present position” (William Kentridge, qtd. in Taylor 1998, ix). Among the key participants in this civic theatre were victims, perpetrators, TRC commissioners, translators, and audiences that the Commission itself constituted and called into being. The TRC was divided into three branches: a) the Human Rights Violations Committee, which heard testimony by victims; b) the Amnesty Committee, which received applications from perpetrators; and c) the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee, charged with making recommendations to the presi- dent on appropriate measures to be taken to restore the human and civil dignity of victims (Truth and Reconciliation Commission [1998] 1999, 44). From its inception, the TRC was criticized. Its very structure was based upon the premise that there were two clear categories—victims and perpetrators—thereby disallowing the more ambivalent mixture of these that characterizes any society, but particularly one that lived through apartheid. The TRC also only considered gross violations of human rights and therefore did not give voice to the more routine yet no less intensely experienced suffering by the majority of South Africans . The Commission has been further criticized for its propensity to focus on the most villainous perpetrators, thereby diverting public attention from the larger political structures and leaders upon whom responsibility for apartheid ultimately rests. And ¤nally, there was no place in the Commission for those who were merely bene¤ciaries of apartheid, rather than inventors or direct perpetrators , to be held to account (Mamdani 2000). Despite its ®aws, the Commission’s work cannot easily be dismissed. In the human rights area alone, the Commission received statements by 21,290 victims , and of these over 2,000 received a public hearing. Victim testimony exposed information that apartheid had repressed. Audiences learned what happened to people, the scope of the atrocities, the pervasiveness of apartheid’s corruption of human relationships. Public hearings were ¤lled with stories of profound and devastating loss. At so many moments, the TRC’s whole semblance of a courtroom dropped away. The stories and their mode of telling transcended the mechanism of their presentation. As has so often happened in South Africa, truth outstripped imagination.1 If presented in a work of ¤ction, the tales would hardly be believed. Journalists, commissioners, translators, spectators , even Chairperson Desmond Tutu were left at times unable to speak, reduced to tears, overcome by the public airing of unspeakable deeds. Looking back at the months of TRC hearings, certain moments stand out for their overwhelming theatricality. During cross-examination by his victims, Jeffrey Benzien, the notorious torturer and former captain in the South African police security branch, spontaneously demonstrated his “wet bag” technique, the way he suffocated victims to the brink of death.2 When Joyce Mtimkulu faced the man responsible for the torture and death of her son, she held in her hand a clump of her son’s hair, which had...

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